• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, January 27, 2025

"Numbers call me," said Jeffrey Bustos, who is senior vice president, retail media analytics at Merkle, a Denstu company.

That was how he started the conversation with MediaPost, adding that he most looks forward to seeing how "hybrid ecommerce" in retail media emerges this year. 

Bustos, born in Colombia, would count in his head as a kid and keep a tally of the numbers. He moved to California at an early age and began initially counting in Spanish and then in English.

“With my obsessions of numbers, I can recall the day I actually stopped counting in Spanish and then began counting in English,” he said. “Sometimes I do mathematical equations to relax. I look at data to create a story.”

The ability to tell a story with numbers is what Bustos wanted to bring to Merkle after spending years at the Interactive Advertising Bureau as vice president of measurement addressability data.

At Merkle, he will build out Denstu’s retail-media business. He wants people to look at measurement as leading indicators of what happened and how to approach optimization, and thought Merkle would be the perfect place to do it.

“I met Brian Monahan last year in San Francisco,” he said. “I would brainstorm with Brian all types of ideas as I ran the retail media committee and developed standards at the IAB.”

Monahan serves as global client president and head of the agency’s retail media solutions at Dentsu.

To make a long story short, he got along really well working with the folks at Dentsu while developing retail media standards and practices at the IAB.

“If I were to write my own job description it would be to help retailers and brands improve digital infrastructure and measurement, as well as continue to understand how to optimize retail media for growth. With this role, I can put everything I did at the IAB into action.”

Bustos is most excited to work on performance and measurement in retail media this year. Brands are looking to focus dollars on retailers that can prove incremental impact and improve the infrastructure.

"Consumers are walking through Walmart, Kroger, and CVS on their phones on WhatsApp, Instagram and TikTok, checking emails and reading the news," he said. "We are highbred beings where we live in the physical and digital environment In retail media, we will see a true highbred interaction and adaptive commerce. A lot more collaboration in clean rooms and generative AI."

In his new role, Bustos will continue to focus on driving industry best practices for insights, segmentation, measurement, and optimization as part of Dentsu’s industry-leading retail media group—the only one in the industry with extensive leadership and client offerings across sell-side, buy-side, and in-store client activity.

The team, led by Monahan, global client president and head of retail media solutions, also has recently welcomed Sara Holcomb, senior vice president of global retail partnerships from Google; Will Margaritis, executive vice president, head of commerce and retail media from Kinesso; and Katie Pretti, senior vice president, commerce and retail media from Publicis.