Why Media Excellence Now Means Doing Less — and Doing It Better

Adam Benaroya on strategic simplification, reach plus relevance, and the growing challenge of retail media measurement.

In a marketing industry increasingly defined by dashboards, data layers, and expanding channel choices, Adam Benaroya has been advocating something refreshingly counterintuitive: strategic simplification.

Over the course of his career — spanning leadership roles at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Johnson & Johnson Consumer Health, and most recently Kenvue — Benaroya has helped build global media excellence practices grounded in a deceptively simple question: What truly drives impact?

That question has become more important as the media landscape grows more complicated. New platforms promise precision targeting, data ecosystems continue to expand, and marketers face an ever-growing array of partners, vendors, and measurement frameworks.

But according to Benaroya, complexity itself rarely creates value. In many cases, it quietly drains time, budget, and creative energy from the work that actually matters.

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Instead, he encourages marketers to rethink how media strategies are designed and evaluated. Rather than optimizing endlessly for reach alone, Benaroya advocates a balance between Reach + Relevance — ensuring that media investments not only reach category buyers but connect with them in ways that genuinely matter.

This perspective requires discipline. It means scrutinizing channel choices, questioning the true value of third-party data, tightening supply chains, and ensuring that new technologies serve the strategy — not the other way around.

It also means recognizing that the most effective marketing organizations are not those chasing every innovation, but those confident enough to focus on the fundamentals.

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The goal isn’t to eliminate innovation. It’s to make sure complexity never gets in the way of impact. — Adam Benaroya

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That philosophy extends to one of the fastest-growing areas of marketing investment: retail media.

As retailers rapidly build their own media ecosystems, advertisers are gaining powerful new ways to connect with shoppers closer to the point of purchase. But the rapid growth of retail media has also introduced new challenges — particularly around measurement standards and vendor transparency.

These issues will be at the center of discussion at the 2026 ANA Media Conference, where Benaroya will join industry leaders for a session on Retail Media Measurement. The panel will examine the need for clearer guidelines and shared measurement frameworks as advertisers navigate an increasingly crowded field of retail media platforms.

For marketers, the challenge is familiar: balancing new opportunities with responsible evaluation of cost, performance, and long-term impact.

Benaroya believes that the principles of strategic simplification can help guide those decisions. The goal is not to reject innovation, but to ensure that complexity never becomes an obstacle to effectiveness.

Importantly, simplification also creates space for something often lost in the race toward automation: creativity.

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In this Trendsetters conversation, we discuss:

• You’ve become an outspoken advocate for “strategic simplification” in media — essentially celebrating doing less to achieve more. Why do you think modern marketing has drifted toward unnecessary complexity, and what does it take inside an organization to shift the culture back toward clarity and impact?

• You’ve suggested that layers of data, dashboards, and tech can actually work against marketers’ ability to drive profitable growth. How can marketers — regardless of role — better recognize the point where complexity is no longer adding value? And what are the most overlooked “hidden costs”?

• You’ve spoken about your efforts to transition from pure reach-based planning to a Reach + Relevance model. What does this shift look like in practice, and why should non-media marketers — perhaps in brand, insights, or activation — care about this evolution?

• A lot of media complexity is driven by industry norms: targeting precision, new vendor promises, channel expansion, retail media pressure. How do you build the confidence — and the evidence — to say “no” to what everyone else seems to be doing?

• Retail media is now one of the fastest-growing marketing investments, yet you’ve flagged issues around transparency, data quality, and alignment. What should every marketer understand about the real risks and relationship dynamics behind retail media — especially when these decisions affect more than just the media team?

• You’ve talked about the problem of incentives in the programmatic ecosystem. If you were advising a CMO, what’s the single smartest question they should ask their partners about programmatic in 2026?

• Most marketers are early on AI. Where do you see AI truly accelerating marketing excellence, and where do you worry it may simply add another layer of complexity without solving the fundamentals?

• As attention splinters and consumer behavior shifts, what does “media excellence” really mean in 2026? Are they skills? Mindset? Governance? Cultural alignment?

• What one thing should every marketer know about simplification — even if they never touch media?

• What’s a misconception about media that you wish all marketers would let go of?

• When has simplification surprised you — delivering unexpectedly big results?

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Although Benaroya began his career in analytics and digital marketing, he has long emphasized that the strongest campaigns emerge when data and creativity work together — not when technology dominates the conversation.

For these contributions — and for consistently advocating a more thoughtful, disciplined approach to media leadership — The Internationalist named Adam Benaroya an Internationalist of the Year in 2025.