Most CPG marketing budgets flow to two places: awareness at the top and conversion at the bottom. TV spots, display ads, and social impressions to get your name out there. Retail media, search ads, and trade promotions to close the sale at the shelf. That's the playbook, and brands spent roughly $48.79 billion on advertising in 2024 following it.
The problem is what's missing in the middle. Between "I've seen that brand" and "I'm putting it in my cart," there's a consideration phase where a shopper decides whether your product is actually worth trying. And almost nobody is investing there.
Think about how it actually works. A shopper sees your brand on a billboard or a YouTube pre-roll. They now know you exist. Then, weeks later, they're on Instacart and your sponsored listing pops up. But between those two moments, nothing happened. No one gave them a reason to care about your product specifically. No one showed them what it tastes like, how it fits into their life, or why it's better than what they bought last time.
Pear Commerce called mid-funnel marketing the most overlooked lever in CPG growth, and they're right. You can't move someone from awareness to purchase with a search ad. You need proof, context, and trust. Those take a different kind of content.
ShopLiftr made it even clearer: most off-site programmatic creative reaches the right audience but is completely disconnected from what's on deal at the shopper's nearest store. The messaging builds awareness and then falls apart at the exact moment it should convert.
This isn't B2B. Nobody's downloading a whitepaper about your snack bars. In grocery and retail, mid-funnel content is the stuff that makes someone say "I need to try that" before they walk into the store. It's a creator making a weeknight dinner with your pasta sauce and tagging the Kroger where she bought it. A mom reviewing your protein bars in her car after school pickup, comparing them side-by-side with the brand she used to buy. A fitness creator showing their weekly Walmart haul and explaining exactly why they switched.
This kind of content does three specific things:
It builds trust through social proof. A real person choosing your product over the alternatives carries more weight than any sponsored listing ever will. 60% of consumers say social media influences what they buy in physical stores, and that influence is happening in the consideration phase, not at checkout.
It connects discovery to a specific store. When a creator says "I found this at the Target on Elm Street," they're collapsing the entire purchase funnel into one moment. The shopper knows what the product is, why someone they trust likes it, and exactly where to go get it.
It creates the "mental shopping list" effect.TikTok's partnership with InMarket proved this with location data. Consumers who saw creator content about a product were significantly more likely to visit a physical store within days. They'd mentally added the product to their next grocery run.
Before Bloom Nutrition became a $300 million brand acquired by Glanbia, Mari Llewellyn built it almost entirely through creator content. Not TV, not retail media. Fitness and lifestyle creators sharing their Bloom routines on Instagram and TikTok. That content wasn't top-funnel (people already knew Bloom from their social feeds) and it wasn't bottom-funnel (no coupon codes or search ads involved). It was pure mid-funnel. Consideration-stage content that made people think "I should grab that next time I'm at Target."
Chomps did the same thing in meat snacks. They went from a niche DTC brand to a $660 million acquisition by Hormel, capturing 2% of the market but driving 40% of the category's growth. They couldn't outspend Jack Link's or Slim Jim on retail media. So they won the mid-funnel instead, through authentic creator content that positioned Chomps as the cleaner alternative. That's comparison-driven, trust-building content. It lives in the consideration phase, and it scaled a brand that shouldn't have been able to compete.
We've seen it in our own campaigns at Crafted, driving as much as a 60% sales lift with some of our highest performing campagns.
Some brands think retail media covers the consideration phase. It doesn't. Retail media is built for conversion. It shows your product to someone who's already browsing the category on a retailer's site. By the time someone sees your sponsored listing on Instacart, they've already decided they need something in your category. The only question is which brand gets the click.
The mid-funnel is where you influence whether someone shops the category at all, or whether they pick you over the brand they bought last time. That takes content that educates, entertains, and builds trust. Retail media operates inside a purchase-ready environment. The mid-funnel operates in an inspiration environment. They're different jobs.
The industry is starting to see this. Skai's 2026 CPG marketing analysis noted that three separate channels are merging: retail media data powering CTV attribution, programmatic extending beyond retailer properties, and full-funnel commerce media becoming the norm. But even in that converged world, someone still needs to create the content that makes people care enough to convert. That's the mid-funnel job, and creators do it better than any ad format.
CPG brands already average 25-30% of digital spend on retail media. Instead of adding more there, carve out a portion for creator-driven mid-funnel content. The approach that's worked across our campaigns: recruit creators who actually shop at the retailers where your product is sold, have them show the product in real use at real stores, amplify through paid social in the geographic areas around those locations, and measure through receipt-based attribution or velocity data.
The awareness gets your name out there. The mid-funnel content gives shoppers a reason to pick you. The retail media and shelf presence close the deal. Skip the middle, and you're spending money to be recognized without being chosen.
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