Something is reportedly breaking down inside Perion Network’s agency partnerships division — and the fallout is landing squarely in the laps of DTC founders who trusted the company’s pitch on cross-channel retail media. According to three sources familiar with the situation, at least a dozen mid-market DTC brands managing between $2M and $15M in annual ad spend have quietly reassigned their accounts or issued RFPs to competing agencies over the past 60 days, citing frustration with Perion’s pivot away from performance marketing and toward connected TV inventory.
What Is Allegedly Driving DTC Brands Away From Perion?
Sources close to the matter say the trouble began in Q1 2026, when Perion’s leadership — reportedly championed by CEO Tal Jacobson — pushed aggressively into CTV and retail media network inventory following the company’s deal to integrate with Walmart Connect. That pivot, unconfirmed by Perion, allegedly left the company’s Google Shopping and Meta Ads managed-service teams understaffed and under-resourced. One source, a growth lead at a seven-figure DTC kitchenware brand, described the experience as “watching the lights go out in slow motion.”
“We were promised a unified dashboard connecting our Meta spend to Walmart retail media signals. Six months later, we’re still manually pulling reports from three different platforms. Our ROAS on branded search dropped 18% in that window.” — anonymous DTC growth director, kitchenware vertical
Industry contacts say the vacuum is being filled rapidly. Tinuiti — whose managing director of retail media, Evan Kirkpatrick, has been vocal at recent ShopTalk events about full-funnel DTC methodology — is reportedly onboarding several former Perion clients. Wpromote’s commerce team is said to be in late-stage talks with at least two fashion DTC brands that departed Perion in May 2026.
Is Perion’s CTV Bet Cannibalizing Its Performance Marketing Core?
The alleged internal resource conflict reflects a broader tension in the performance marketing world: agencies and ad-tech platforms that built their reputations on lower-funnel, direct-response channels are now chasing higher-margin CTV and retail media contracts — sometimes at the expense of the Google Shopping, Meta Advantage+, and SMS programs that actually moved product for their DTC clients.
Reportedly, several Perion account managers with deep expertise in Google Performance Max and Meta Advantage+ Shopping campaigns were reassigned or departed in a restructuring that sources describe as “quiet but significant.” One former Perion employee, now at a boutique performance agency, told Ecommerce Times the shift left junior staffers managing accounts that previously had senior oversight.
“The people who knew how to build a proper Advantage+ catalog campaign structure, or how to segment a PMAX asset group by margin tier — a lot of them are gone. The institutional knowledge walked out the door.” — former Perion account manager, speaking anonymously
Perion did not respond to a request for comment before publication.
Which Agencies and Platforms Are Allegedly Picking Up the Displaced Spend?
Beyond Tinuiti and Wpromote, sources say the displaced DTC ad spend is flowing in several directions:
- Ampush (now part of Integrated agency group): reportedly in conversations with two beauty DTC brands that were Perion managed-service clients, with total displaced Meta spend estimated at $400K per month.
- Amsive: said to be actively pitching former Perion clients on its SMS-to-paid-social retargeting workflow, which layers Klaviyo audience segments into Meta Custom Audiences in near-real-time.
- Common Thread Collective: sources suggest CTC’s DTC-specialist positioning is landing well with founders who feel burned by larger platforms making enterprise pivots mid-contract.
- Smartly.io: the creative automation platform is allegedly being brought in as a direct buy by several brands that previously relied on Perion’s managed service for Meta creative testing — cutting the agency layer entirely.
One agency new business lead described the current environment as “a fire sale on Perion’s DTC book” — an characterization that is, of course, unconfirmed and contested by at least one source who believes the departures are overstated.
How Are DTC Founders Responding to the Uncertainty?
For the brands caught in the middle, the timing is particularly painful. June through August represents the critical summer acquisition window for categories including outdoor, fitness, and home goods — segments where Perion has historically had strong managed-service representation. Losing momentum in Google Shopping feed optimization or letting Meta campaign frequency drift during this period can be costly.
Founders who spoke with Ecommerce Times on background described a scramble to rebuild internal competency fast:
- Several reportedly hired freelance Google Shopping specialists through platforms like Mayple and PPC Hire to cover gaps while evaluating new agency relationships.
- At least two brands are said to have moved their Meta accounts in-house temporarily, using Motion (the creative analytics tool) and Foreplay.co to maintain testing velocity without a managed-service layer.
- One founder in the supplements-adjacent wellness space — operating cleanly within FTC guidelines — told us she accelerated her TikTok Shop affiliate program as a hedge, citing more predictable CAC through TikTok’s affiliate commission model versus volatile Meta CPMs.
“We spent Q2 rebuilding what we thought we had. The honest answer is we should have had more internal ownership of our paid channels regardless. This just forced the issue.” — DTC founder, home goods vertical, annual revenue approximately $8M
Is This Symptomatic of a Wider Managed-Service Agency Crisis?
Sources across the DTC agency ecosystem say Perion’s alleged client attrition is not an isolated phenomenon — it’s a visible example of a structural stress fracture running through managed-service ad agencies that are trying to serve two masters simultaneously: the high-margin, enterprise-oriented world of retail media and CTV, and the scrappy, performance-obsessed world of DTC founder brands.
“The fundamental problem,” according to one agency consultant who works with both brands and platform vendors, “is that a $3M DTC brand and a $300M CPG brand need completely different things from a media partner. When you try to build one team that serves both, you end up serving neither well.”
Insiders point to similar dynamics allegedly unfolding at other mid-tier performance agencies that have been aggressively courting retail media network partnerships with Amazon Ads and Criteo, sometimes reallocating senior talent from legacy paid social and search teams in the process.
What Should DTC Operators Watch For in Agency Partner Vetting?
Several agency leaders and brand operators offered tactical guidance for DTC founders evaluating or re-evaluating managed-service partnerships in the current environment:
- Ask for named account managers upfront — and contractually require notification if a senior contact is reassigned. Sources say this is a standard ask that many brands forget to codify.
- Request a channel-specific staffing breakdown — specifically how many FTEs are dedicated to Meta Advantage+, Google Shopping PMAX, and SMS versus CTV or retail media if those are not your primary channels.
- Audit creative testing velocity quarterly — tools like Motion or Triple Whale’s creative dashboard can expose whether your agency is actually running structured tests or just recycling top performers.
- Benchmark CAC trajectory against industry comps — Northbeam and Rockerbox both publish vertical-level CAC benchmark reports that can flag whether underperformance is market-wide or agency-specific.
- Negotiate 60-day exit clauses — standard agency contracts often run 90 days. In a volatile landscape, 60-day out clauses with data portability guarantees are increasingly non-negotiable for sophisticated DTC operators.
Whether Perion’s reported DTC client losses amount to a genuine inflection point or a temporary disruption tied to a deliberate strategic pivot remains, at this point, unconfirmed. But the underlying tension — between the enterprise ambitions of ad-tech platforms and the relentless performance demands of DTC founders — is very real, and apparently very expensive for the brands caught between those two worlds.
Ecommerce Times reached out to Perion Network, Tinuiti, and Wpromote for comment. Tinuiti and Wpromote declined to confirm or deny specific client discussions. Perion did not respond by press time.
