Philadelphia Cream Cheese has stopped paying for search ads, at least to prospective shoppers on Google.
Over the past year, the Kraft Heinz-owned CPG brand has phased out its traditional search ad spend, opting to put those dollars instead into retail media and broader channels, according to Maddy Zingle, vp of marketing for Philadelphia Cream Cheese at Kraft Heinz.
“People are not typing ‘cream cheese’ into Google,” Zingle told Digiday. “Where we are trying to integrate is more into the actual recipes and the usage occasions, as opposed to just buying branded search terms.” Zingle declined to specify how much the CPG brand is spending on retail media.
A fragmented search landscape
It’s a calculated bet. There are more places than ever to search online. For something like cream cheese, shoppers are less likely to turn to Google and more likely to start on a grocer’s website — hence the retail media play.
“Even the people searching, they already know what they’re looking for, so you’re not really getting any incremental activity out of it,” said Nitin Sinha, head of media planning at Noble People.
Instead, Philadelphia Cream Cheese invests in e-commerce and retail search “because that is extremely lower funneled, direct-to-purchase for us,” Zingle said. For example, if someone searched the team “cheesecake” on the Walmart+ app, the CPG brand would buy the term for its product to be the first one displayed in the results, she added.
Philadelphia Cream Cheese spent nearly $495,000 across seven retail media networks last year, according to MediaRadar ad intelligence platform. Around 29% of that spend was dedicated to ads with midwestern grocer Meijer. MediaRadar found no Google paid search activity for Philadelphia Cream Cheese in 2025.
In total, Philadelphia Cream Cheese spent $31.8 million on U.S. digital advertising in 2025, per insights from AdClarity, a digital-first ad intelligence platform. Nearly half of the budget went to CTV with social platforms accounting for nearly another half.
Rethinking search in the mix
Retail media networks have been the industry’s golden child — especially for CPG brands that bank on an in-store presence. Increasingly, brands are pivoting at least a portion of their Google search dollars to brand awareness channels and retail media networks to get a better net result in a fragmented digital landscape, according to Markacy performance marketing agency — especially as Google remains a top search platform.
However, that’s not to say the agency is putting a nail in Google’s coffin. Markacy recommends clients reserve ad dollars for traditional search.
“I believe traditional search is still growing, which is the interesting part of it,” said Christopher Jones, co-founder and co-CEO at Markacy.
Keeping the status quo
Further down the dairy aisle, Kerrygold butter has a similar thinking pattern. Kerrygold is layering agentic and AI search on top of existing traditional search and retail media, according to Brian Cleere, global brand director at Kerrygold.
“We are definitely giving a lot of attention to being [in] agentic search, but we’re not sunsetting maybe some of the things that we’ve done around traditional search,” Cleere said.
No doubt the search landscape is showing cracks. Google is no longer the only game in town as people research products everywhere from Reddit to retailer websites and of course, LLMs. That’s not to say ChatGPT is replacing Google. As the LLMs pull from a multitude of sources across the internet, marketers are divvying up their media strategies to be everywhere all at once — at least as best they can.
Last summer, Bose paused its paid search in half of its U.S. marketer as part of a test to build out an AI model to determine where to invest spend, per Adweek.
As far as AI search hacks go, that’s a nut Philadelphia Cream Cheese is still trying to crack. In the meantime the safe bet is e-commerce and retailer-focused search, Zingle said, adding, “We’re able to just directly connect across the digital ecosystem to get straight to purchase, understand more about those consumers, get the data behind it.”