The case for commerce media has been made. Budgets are shifting, narratives are changing and the industry has largely accepted that retail media in its traditional, Retail Media Network (RMN)-centric form — was only ever part of the story. Commerce media represents a fuller picture: a model that connects brands to consumers across a sprawling, high-intent ecosystem that extends well beyond a retailer’s on-site inventory.
The industry has accepted the premise. The execution is where it gets harder.
For most brands and retailers, the honest answer is not yet. The enthusiasm is real. The execution hasn’t caught up. Commerce media has expanded into environments such as appointment platforms, post-purchase moments, financial services ecosystems, non-endemic contexts — that most strategies weren’t designed to reach. The result is a growing gap between where the opportunity lives and where the investment actually goes.
The map has changed. Most strategies are using an old one.
Commerce media’s defining characteristic is proximity to a purchase decision, to a high-intent moment, to first-party data that makes targeting and measurement genuinely meaningful. That proximity isn’t exclusive to the major RMNs. It exists wherever consumers are actively transacting and that universe is significantly larger than the on-site and off-site inventory most retail media plans are built around.
Ticketing platforms where consumers are locked into a high-intent purchase moment. Travel ecosystems where booking confirmations open a window of active planning behavior. Appointment-based services where recurring transactions create predictable, addressable audiences. Post-purchase environments where ad exposure connects directly to transaction records. Each of these is an expression of the same underlying insight and each represents an opportunity that a digitally-focused RMN playbook wasn’t built to capture.
The brands and retailers winning in this space recognized early that commerce media wasn’t just an expansion of retail media. It was a different way of thinking about where intent lives, how data activates it and what measurable performance actually looks like across a more complex ecosystem.
Where strong commerce media strategies separate from lukewarm ones
Treating RMNs as the strategy, not the starting point. On-site placements and off-site extensions are table stakes in commerce media, not a competitive advantage. Brands that optimize exclusively within that lane are leaving significant reach and performance on the table in environments where their shoppers are already transacting — and where the competition is considerably thinner.
Selling inventory instead of outcomes. Fragmented channel buys produce fragmented results. Brands and retailers that go to market with disconnected inventory offerings give partners no framework for building integrated plans. The ones building durable partnerships are packaging cohesive, full-funnel solutions and making the measurement case that connects media exposure to real business outcomes across every environment in the mix.
Underinvesting in measurement. Measurement is where commerce media programs lose advertiser trust and budget. According to Skai’s 2025 State of Retail Media report, difficulty proving incrementality is the most common reason brands reduce spend, cited by 36% of respondents. The closer media gets to the moment of purchase — wherever that moment occurs — the clearer the connection between exposure and outcome becomes. Those who can demonstrate true incrementality across environments will win a larger and more defensible share of budgets.
Brands have work to do too
Networks can expand the ecosystem. But a genuinely integrated commerce media strategy only delivers when brands show up with an equally integrated approach.
The most persistent failure is organizational. Spend across commerce media environments typically sits with different teams, different KPIs and different agency relationships. The result is disconnected campaigns that happen to involve the same consumer. Aligning ecommerce, brand, shopper and performance teams around shared objectives isn’t a process improvement, it’s a prerequisite for commerce media to work at all.
The second failure is creative. Media built for one environment doesn’t translate automatically to another. Each context has its own consumer mindset, its own moment in the journey, its own definition of relevance. Brands that treat creative as a transferable asset will underperform in every environment it wasn’t designed for which, in an ecosystem as varied as commerce media, is most of them.
The heat is real. Now build something that can handle it.
Commerce media’s growth story is well established. The next chapter belongs to the brands and retailers that move past recognizing the opportunity and start building strategies genuinely capable of operating inside it.
That doesn’t mean building a commerce media network from scratch. The infrastructure, the data connections, the measurement frameworks these are table stakes that the right network partner brings to the relationship. What brands and retailers need to bring is clarity: on objectives, on audiences, on what measurable performance actually looks like across an ecosystem that extends well beyond the RMN.
Commerce media is hot. The brands that will define this next era aren’t just the ones who felt the heat, they’re the ones who found the right partners to help them thrive in it.