CPG marketing and advertising strategies to boost sales in 2026

CPG marketers are competing for a shrinking share of consumer attention as shoppers become more price-conscious, private label competition grows, and the buying journey becomes increasingly fragmented.

According to the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), economic uncertainty and softening demand are putting greater pressure on brands as households cut back their spending.

At the same time, the growing number of touch points and paths to purchase—although giving advertisers more opportunities to connect with shoppers—have also made it harder for brands to reach consumers consistently throughout the buying journey and understand which interactions are contributing to sales

Whether they’re promoting a $2 bottle of soda or a $25 bottle of facial serum, to succeed in today’s market, CPG marketers need to reach shoppers beyond retailer-owned platforms, connect upper-funnel awareness to downstream sales, and coordinate campaigns more efficiently to drive incremental growth.

Here are a few ways CPG marketers can do that. But first, the basics (skip ahead if you want to go straight to the strategies).

What is CPG marketing?

CPG marketing is the practice of using advertising, branding, promotions, and other tactics to promote consumer packaged goods (CPG) such as food, beverages, cosmetics, toiletries, cleaning supplies, and over-the-counter medications. It helps brands reach shoppers across digital and traditional channels, build awareness and brand loyalty, differentiate their products from competitors, and, ultimately, drive sales.

Due to the sheer number of options available in nearly every product category, marketers often turn to a mix of strategies, including traditional advertising, content marketing, SEO, social media marketing, and programmatic advertising, to attract and retain customers.

Because of this, it should come as no surprise that US CPG advertisers are predicted to spend nearly $59 billion USD on ads in 2026—making the industry the second-largest digital ad spender behind retail.

What are the biggest challenges facing CPG marketers in 2026?

CPG marketers need to capture attention, earn repeat purchases, and prove what’s driving sales—even when they don’t always have a direct link to the customers buying their products.

Here are four of the main challenges:

Intense competition for physical (and digital) shelf space

With so many brands offering similar items across product categories, competition in the CPG market is fierce. This can make it difficult for even legacy brands—not to mention smaller and emerging companies—to capture attention, protect market share, and convince shoppers to choose their products over the competition.

Changing consumer preferences and behaviors

Consumer tastes are fickle. Preferences and shopping habits can change quickly based on anything from cultural trends to how (and where) they spend their time online. CPG marketers must continually adapt their products, messaging, and channel strategies to meet evolving customer expectations and connect with shoppers wherever they are.

Weakening brand loyalty

With so many options at their disposal, it doesn’t take much for consumers to switch brands due to something as simple as cost or convenience. This makes it more difficult to retain existing customers while forcing CPG marketers to continually attract new buyers in hopes of offsetting churn.

Limited access to customer and purchase data

Because many CPG products are sold through physical retailers and e-commerce marketplaces instead of through direct sales channels, brands often have limited access to first-party data. Without a direct view of who’s buying their products and what influences those decisions, it can be harder to personalize digital marketing campaigns, understand customer behavior, and clearly connect specific channels to sales.

Retailer dependency

Retailers play a major role in how CPG products are discovered and purchased. But relying too heavily on retailer-owned platforms can limit a brand’s control over where and how it reaches consumers. 

CPG marketers need to balance investments in retail media networks (RMNs), which can help reach high-intent shoppers closer to purchase, with channels that build demand beyond retailer ecosystems and support longer-term brand growth.

Why is omnichannel advertising important to CPG marketing?

Today’s shoppers don’t follow a linear path to purchase. They might discover a product on social media, research it through an AI chatbot or by searching for online reviews, see an ad for it while streaming TV, and later decide to purchase it in-store or through a retailer’s website.

For CPG marketers, success isn’t about choosing just one channel. It’s about creating connected experiences across every touch point. 

An omnichannel strategy helps build awareness, improve brand recognition throughout the buying journey, and better understand how media investments contribute to sales.

But to do that, first you need the right channels.

What channels drive the highest impact for CPG brands?

No single channel can reach every shopper, let alone influence every stage of the buying journey. The best CPG campaigns combine channels based on the role each one plays, from creating demand and driving discovery to reaching high-intent audiences closer to purchase.

Here are some of the channels that need to be part of your CPG marketing strategy:

Display advertising

Some people think display advertising is dead. It isn’t.

With its low CPMs and ability to direct consumers directly to websites or product pages to learn more information, display advertising is commonly seen as a cost-effective way to drive traffic and return on ad spend.

With display advertising, CPG brands can introduce new products to consumers, reach relevant audiences, and reconnect with customers who have previously shown interest in specific products or categories. It can also help brands stay visible between purchase cycles, keeping their products top of mind when consumers are ready to buy again.

Best used for: Building awareness, supporting product launches, retargeting engaged audiences, and maintaining visibility throughout the buying journey.

Video advertising

Video advertising helps CPG brands use sight, sound, and motion to demonstrate products, communicate their benefits, and create stronger emotional connections with consumers. 

Ads can run across social media, streaming video platforms like YouTube, and, in the case of programmatic video, websites where audiences are watching content or researching what to buy.

Increasingly, AI-powered creative tools—like StackAdapt’s AI Video Builder—are helping brands of all sizes create high-quality, on-brand videos in a fraction of the time it typically takes to brainstorm, film, and edit ads for campaigns. Learn more here. 

Best used for: Telling brand stories, showcasing products, and influencing awareness and consideration through engaging visual content.

Social media advertising

In 2025, 34.7% of CPG ad dollars were expected to go toward social media—a larger share than in any other industry.

Social media advertising helps CPG marketers reach consumers based on their interests, behaviors, and previous interactions with a brand.

Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest are useful for introducing products, capitalizing on emerging trends, and reaching shoppers as they scroll through their feeds and are open to discovering new brands.

Best used for: Product discovery, community building, and generating demand through visual and interactive ad experiences.

Retail media advertising

By leveraging retailer-owned data, CPG marketers can use RMNs to reach shoppers through websites, apps, search results, and off-site media placements—helping them connect with customers closer to the point of purchase and better understand how specific campaigns contribute to sales.

Best used for: Reaching high-intent shoppers, increasing product visibility, and using retailer data to target relevant audiences both on retailer-owned properties and across off-site channels.

Email marketing

Although email marketing isn’t a paid advertising channel and is more closely associated with martech, it can give CPG brands a direct and cost-effective way to communicate with consumers who join loyalty programs, enter promotions, or purchase items through direct-to-consumer channels. 

These interactions can also help brands collect information about customer preferences and behaviors as part of their first-party data strategy—allowing them to use those insights to deliver more personalized offers and product recommendations.

Best used for: Strengthening customer relationships, encouraging repeat purchases, and activating first-party data to create more relevant customer experiences

DOOH advertising

Digital out-of-home (DOOH) advertising helps CPG brands reach consumers through screens in high-traffic locations like shopping centres, grocery stores, subway stations, gyms, and outside sports arenas.

Unlike traditional out-of-home advertising, DOOH campaigns can be scheduled and tailored to align with their location, time of day, weather, and nearby events. This allows brands to promote products in more relevant moments, whether that means advertising cold beverages during a heatwave or reaching shoppers near stores where a product is available.

Best used for: Building awareness in high-traffic environments, supporting product launches and seasonal campaigns, and influencing consumers closer to stores and other points of purchase.

CTV advertising

Connected TV (CTV) advertising helps CPG marketers reach audiences with high-impact video when viewers are most attentive, such as during live sports—like the FIFA World Cup or Super Bowl—and other premium viewing environments.

CTV can support broad awareness while also using various attribution and measurement models to link ad exposure to specific actions, such as website visits, store visits, and product sales.

Best used for: Reaching large or targeted audiences in high-attention viewing environments and connecting upper-funnel awareness to downstream results.

ChatGPT advertising

Product discovery is expanding beyond search engines, with consumers increasingly asking AI assistants for recommendations before they ever reach retailer websites. 

According to EMARKETER, 57.9% of consumers say they currently use AI tools to find the best price on products, while 49.2% said they use them to generate gift ideas.

LLM advertising channels like ChatGPT give CPG brands a new way to influence purchase consideration earlier in the buying journey and reach shoppers as they use AI to research products, compare options, and ask for recommendations.

Because ads are matched primarily to the context of a conversation, marketers can introduce relevant products when someone is deciding what to buy—helping brands reach shoppers with more relevant messages when they’re actively considering their options.

Best used for: Reaching shoppers during product discovery and consideration phases.

What are some of the best CPG marketing strategies and tactics?

In CPG, the best marketing strategies do more than build awareness. They help brands show up where shoppers are already looking, keep products relevant across the journey, and make it easier to see what actually drove sales.

Here are some of the best strategies and tactics:

Use retail media to reach shoppers closer to purchase

Retail media gives CPG marketers a direct way to reach shoppers while they’re actively browsing, comparing, or buying products.

By leveraging a retailer’s first-party data, brands can target audiences based on purchase history, search behavior, and category interest—either through the retailer’s own ecosystem, like sponsored product listings and onsite display ads, or off-site through programmatic channels like CTV, video, or native advertising.

Retail media is especially useful for launching new products, running always-on marketing campaigns, and proving ROI across the customer journey—helping marketers drive incremental reach and sales, whether online or in-store.

Expand beyond traditional media

For years, CPG brands leaned heavily on traditional advertising channels to build awareness and support in-store sales. 

But over the past decade, budgets have steadily shifted away from channels like traditional linear TV, radio, and out-of-home advertising, with EMARKETER reporting that CPG ad spending on traditional media declined by 9.2% in 2025—a faster decline than nearly any other industry.

Programmatic channels like CTV, native, DOOH, and audio can offer more flexible, incremental reach than traditional advertising channels and walled gardens, allowing CPG marketers to connect with audiences as they go about their daily lives, both online and in the physical world.

Align campaigns with seasonal consumer moments

CPG demand naturally rises and falls throughout the year as moments like back-to-school, Halloween, and holiday shopping dictate what consumers need and when they’re most likely to buy it.

But demand often starts forming well before these moments arrive.

According to Forrester, nearly three-quarters of US adults online started their holiday shopping before December last year.

Rather than treating each shift in consumer demand as a standalone campaign, CPG marketers can use an always-on strategy that adapts creative, messaging, and channel mix as consumer intent changes—giving brands more time to build awareness, test creative, and reach shoppers before they’ve narrowed down their options.

Combining channels like CTV, retail media, DOOH, display, and social can help brands stay relevant throughout the buying journey—and beyond—while making the most of the periods when demand is highest.

Personalize ad creative at scale with DCO

Dynamic creative optimization (DCO) helps CPG marketers tailor product imagery, messaging, offers, and calls to action based on audience insights, location, real-time data, and campaign performance.

Rather than manually creating separate ads for every product or audience, marketers can automate multiple creative variations and update elements like promotions or retailer information to direct customers to nearby stores.

Internal StackAdapt platform data shows that advertisers using DCO saw a 32% higher click-through rate and a 56% lower cost per click than advertisers that didn’t use it. Read StackAdapt’s The State of Programmatic Advertising to learn more.

Use personalization to make ads and offers more relevant

No two shoppers are exactly alike.

CPG marketers can use first-party data, retailer insights, and campaign engagement signals to tailor messaging, offers, and product recommendations based on their interests, needs, and previous purchases.

For example, a premium skincare brand could promote a high-value anti-aging product to customers who regularly purchase related items or offer existing buyers a personalized discount when they should be ready to replenish their supply.

When used strategically, personalization can improve relevance, encourage repeat purchases, and strengthen customer relationships.

Reach shoppers without relying on audience data alone

Contextual advertising helps CPG marketers reach consumers based on the topics and types of content they’re consuming.

StackAdapt’s Page Context AI allows CPG marketers to input a few product-related phrases relevant to their brand and place ads alongside content that align with their product offering or category—even in regulated verticals, where other targeting options may be limited. 

Commerce AI Audiences add another layer to the strategy by identifying high-intent audiences who are most likely to convert by analyzing recent behavioral and transaction signals, such as the types of topics they recently read about or engaged with online.

Together, these tools can help marketers reach more relevant audiences and drive stronger campaign performance. Brands that combine their own customer data—from CRM lists, marketing tools like Shopify, or CDP segments—with retail purchase signals have a better chance of outperforming those still relying on third-party audiences alone.

Shorten the path to purchase

To increase sales, it’s not just about promoting your products—it’s also about reducing friction.

For CPG brands, much of that is left up to the merchandising, product placement, and the checkout experience.

Click2Cart ads are the equivalent of a shortcut to the shopping cart, boosting conversions and reducing cart abandonment rates by allowing customers to click on a display ad and add items to their cart at specific retailers.

In doing so, brands can reduce the steps it takes to go from ad exposure to purchase—increasing basket size, reducing landing page drop-offs, and seamlessly moving customers from click to checkout.

How do you measure the impact of CPG marketing campaigns?

According to EMARKETER, CPG brands are increasingly abandoning return on ad spend as the primary success metric they use to gauge the impact of campaigns.

Instead, they’re increasingly prioritizing solutions that demonstrate incremental growth and connect media exposure to actual sales outcomes.

Some of these methods include:

• Sales lift studies that compare sales data before and after a campaign to determine the additional sales directly attributable to an ad, often using point-of-sale and loyalty card data to quantify the campaign’s impact on in-store purchases.
• Incrementality, which measures the sales generated by programmatic advertising by comparing groups who were exposed to a campaign to those who weren’t, isolating the true impact of your ads.
• Brand lift studies that assess changes in consumer awareness, perception, consideration, and purchase intent through surveys comparing results from exposed and control groups.
• Cross-channel attribution, which tracks how different channels contribute to conversions, allowing marketers to see which touch points along a customer journey led to a sale.
• SKU-level reporting, which uses transaction and receipt data to help connect ad exposure to sales of specific products.

Together, these measurement methods—all of which are available either in-platform or through third-party partners with StackAdapt—can help CPG marketers understand the real impact of their campaigns beyond surface-level metrics.

CPG advertising case studies

Now that you know how to build a CPG marketing strategy and measure what’s actually driving results, here are a few examples of how digital marketing agencies and brands have partnered with StackAdapt in the past to increase sales for their businesses:

• OPR media used a full-funnel programmatic strategy to drive over 15K customers in-store for their client, Interparfums, Inc. (the world-renowned fragrance manufacturer and distributor of Guess Parfums)—reducing their cost per visit by 14% month-over-month.
• Add3Connect used CTV advertising and StackAdapt’s in-platform brand lift solution to increase brand awareness and measure campaign impact for their client, the well-known sports nutrition and wellness brand Nuun—boosting ad recall by 18.7%.
• Zeno Group used CTV and programmatic video advertising to help nurture awareness for their client, Scotts Miracle-Gro—driving over 7.6M impressions throughout the course of the campaign.
• MarketStorm AI teamed up with StackAdapt’s award-winning Creative Studio to create engaging HTML5 banner ads that helped generate $74,000 USD in new revenue for their client in the high-end food and beverage space.
• Last but not least, Matrixx Shopper Marketing used contextual advertising to build brand awareness for Challenge Butter during the busy holiday baking season, surpassing their click-through rate benchmarks by 21%.

The future of CPG marketing in 2026 and beyond

Looking ahead, the CPG brands that stand out won’t be the ones with the largest budgets—they’ll be the ones that use AI where it actually helps, keep campaigns fresh for newer audiences, and give consumers a reason to care about the brand behind the ad.

AI will become essential

Nearly all aspects of advertising are being reshaped by AI—even in the CPG space, where 70% of marketers expect efficiency gains in the years ahead.

Despite the optimism, the present paints a different picture, with less than 15% of CPG marketers telling BCG that AI is fully embedded into their workflows.

To help close the gap, business leaders need to focus on upskilling and enablement, training their teams to understand where AI provides the most value—like image generation and personalization—and where human input remains important. 

Gen Z will reshape creative for the better

In a recent survey, 43% of Gen Zers said they stopped buying from a brand because they got bored of them—talk about getting ghosted.

Although that’s bad news for brands creating cheugy ad campaigns, those that boost their ad game from mid to memorable will surely earn more attention.

To win over Gen Z, marketers should focus on creating ad copy and creative that feels truly creative, fresh, and with a genuine point of view.

CPG brands will stand for something

Acclaimed author and humorist Mark Twain once said, “never discuss politics or religion in polite company.” But standing behind what you believe is an undeniable part of building a strong and honest relationship with others.

For brands, it’s no different. 

According to a survey by advertising and marketing agency Ogilvy, the average consumer isn’t moved by reward mechanics like discounts or loyalty points alone—it’s shared values that matter, with 75% of consumers saying they choose brands based on the belief that they improve their lives and understand their world.

Building relationships with consumers is a two-way street. Like any relationship, it requires showing up consistently and standing behind what you believe in—even when it’s uncomfortable.

Get started with CPG marketing in StackAdapt

Success in the CPG industry depends on marketers’ ability to unify measurement, audience strategy, and activation across an expanding array of channels.

StackAdapt brings those capabilities together in one platform—helping CPG marketers streamline their campaigns and connect media exposure to sales.

To learn more, speak with our team or get set up today.

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