The Middlemen Podcast by Nextipedia

Most people don’t recognize the name Ahold Delhaize, but almost everyone on the East Coast shops at one of their banners — Stop & Shop, Food Lion, Giant, or Hannaford. Behind those brands is one of the most seasoned operators in grocery and retail media: Bobby Watts, Head of AD Retail Media USA.

In this conversation, Bobby walks us through how his team is building what he calls the “One-Stop Ad Shop,” an in-house, AI-driven platform designed to unify onsite, in-store, and offsite advertising. Edge, their new ad-tech foundation, launches in early 2026 and will power sponsored products, display, and a growing in-store digital screen network.

What makes Bobby’s perspective so valuable is that he’s lived the full evolution — from the early outsourced model (Criteo, Quotient, Epsilon) to today’s push for real-time relevance, predictive audiences, and unified campaign planning across the full funnel. This is retail media through the eyes of someone who understands both the grocery business and the media business, which is rare.

We also link this episode to our earlier conversation with Keith Bryan, the former President of Best Buy Ads, who shares a parallel journey of building a media network from the ground up. Together, these episodes highlight a common throughline: retail media succeeds when tech, merchandising, loyalty, and creative all work as one system.

In this episode we cover:

• Why Ahold Delhaize is bringing its ad tech fully in-house
• How Edge will orchestrate multi-channel media buys
• The shift from loyalty audiences to real-time and predictive signals
• Trade + media planning (“two-in-a-box”) as the next operating model
• How in-store digital is becoming retail’s next creative frontier
• What AI-driven, agentic media planning will unlock for advertisers

If you want to understand where grocery retail media is actually headed — not the hype, but the real work — Bobby’s roadmap is one of the clearest views into the future.

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