Power Digital, President of CPG Division, Charlie Chappell’s Exclusive Interview with MarTech Pulse on CPG Marketing

In an exclusive interview with MarTech Pulse, Charlie Chappell discusses CPG Marketing, retail media, rising customer acquisition costs, AI-driven discovery, measurement, and building profitable growth strategies.

Charlie, after 25 years building growth for consumer brands, what made now the  right time to step into agency leadership as President of the CPG Division at Power Digital?

I was taught early in my career at P&G that the purpose of brand management is to drive growth. It’s a mindset I’ve applied to every job I’ve ever had. When I took over media at The Hershey Company nearly 10 years ago, it was the first wave of digital transformation and I made it my purpose to ensure that we didn’t just pivot how we executed media but that we also accelerated business growth while doing so. 

Today, it’s clear that growth in CPG has shifted to the brands that are disrupting their categories with new differentiated offerings. Many are leveraging the current wave of new digital tools to do this.  

As the President of CPG at Power Digital, I have the privilege of leading a team of experts at the forefront of digital transformation to partner with the top growth CPG brands to do exactly that and I couldn’t be more excited to be in this space. 

Your background spans brand strategy, media transformation, and commercial execution for some of the world’s most recognized consumer brands. How is that depth of experience shaping the way you’re building out Power Digital’s CPG practice?

What I keep seeing is that the fundamentals of brand building aren’t changing even though the tactics of marketing are. 

Just take the topic of GEO. Brands are finding that consumers are turning more to AI to guide their purchasing decisions. It is still absolutely critical for brands to “own their distinctive equities” but now they need to own them within these AI tools as well. Does an LLM response represent your brand properly? If not, what do you need to do to change this? This principle of strong brand building remains the same but the tactics to accomplish it are vastly different from even 2-3 years ago. 

My goal is to bring my experience with those CPG fundamentals to our team at PDM then apply them to cutting edge digital tools to help grow our clients business. 

Power Digital announced this month that you’re now leading its CPG Division. Given how fragmented retail environments and rising customer acquisition costs are squeezing growth models, why does this vertical need dedicated specialization right now?

For the very reason that it takes a fundamental understanding of how CPG brands grow, applied to each fragmented retail environment differently. Take customer acquisition costs. Rising CAC isn’t a platform problem, it’s a natural consequence of growth. As a brand expands past its most loyal consumers, it has to find new buyers in new places, and each of those places behaves differently. Understanding how a brand plays and wins in each retail environment, rather than applying one generic playbook everywhere, is why specialization matters.

The announcement noted CPG brands need a true end-to-end commerce strategy to succeed today. Practically speaking, what does that look like when it moves beyond messaging into measurement, media, and margin?

It means that CPG brands need to get comfortable with imperfect data when they have to make decisions. Yes, you should always be pushing for better and better measurement to guide your decision making but brands have been working with imperfect data for decades and still been able to grow massive businesses. As a brand grows and expands into other channels in order to reach more consumers in more occasions, the signals become less precise because attribution is not exact. Over time, pattern recognition becomes essential to make those calls. 

On the media side, it means media investment can’t be planned channel-by-channel anymore. A dollar moved from paid social to retail media has to be evaluated on incremental impact to the business, not the individual channel’s own scorecard. Every one of those decisions has to be underwritten by what it does to contribution margin, not just top-line growth. Trade spend, retailer terms, and fulfillment costs are just as much a part of the marketing conversation as creative and media in this category.

Power Digital’s proprietary technology analyzes first-party data to guide investment planning. How is a tool like that changing the way CPG brands decide where to spend their next marketing dollar?

What changes is the speed of decisions. A first-party data engine that pulls signals from media, commerce, and retail sell-through in near real time means a client isn’t waiting for a quarterly business review to find out what’s working and what isn’t. They’re seeing it while there’s still time to reallocate. For a growth-stage brand, this is especially critical as an ineffective spend has a compounding negative effect while an effective spend needs to be accelerated. 

Power Digital’s CPG division pairs deep category specialization with enterprise scale intelligence and data. What does that specialization actually unlock for a consumer brand that a generalist marketing agency typically can’t deliver?

Power Digital isn’t specialized in the sense of only working with one kind of brand. The platform underneath every client is the same enterprise-scale data and media infrastructure. What’s specialized is what sits on top of it. A CPG brand has to think about trade spend, retailer terms, and sell-in versus sell-out economics, problems a B2B or lead-gen client never encounters. A generalist agency applies one playbook regardless of category and hopes it translates. What CPG specialization actually unlocks is a team that’s already fluent in those mechanics, so the conversation starts at ‘here’s how we drive velocity at retail’ instead of ‘give us six months to learn your category on your budget.’

Looking ahead to 2027, how do you expect fragmented retail media, rising customer acquisition costs, and AI-driven search discovery to reshape the way CPG brands plan and measure marketing investment?

These three are genuinely different problems. Retail media fragmentation is a measurement problem as each Retail Media Network is basically its own channel with less standardization across networks. Rising CAC is a demand-economics problem, the natural cost of growing past your core audience. AI-driven discovery is something else entirely. It’s a new layer between the brand and the consumer that barely existed three years ago. What ties them together isn’t a single tactic. It’s that all three make perfect measurement less available at exactly the moment budgets are under more scrutiny than ever. The brands that handle 2027 well won’t be the ones with the best attribution model. They’ll be the ones who’ve already built the muscle to make good decisions without one. 

For CPG marketing leaders and brand builders following Power Digital’s work, what’s one piece of advice you’d give as they try to prove ROI on every dollar in this hyper-competitive environment

Stop waiting for perfect attribution before making a decision. I’ve watched brands burn a full budget cycle waiting for measurement certainty that was never going to arrive while a competitor moved on directional evidence and course-corrected along the way. The discipline that actually works is picking fewer bets, sizing them honestly, and building in the checkpoints to know within weeks, not quarters, what’s working. That’s not a lower bar for rigor. It’s a different definition of rigor: judged by how fast you learn, not by how airtight the model looks in a slide.

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