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Key takeaways:
Commerce media has all the characteristics of a digital advertising channel that every brand is searching for.
What began with retailers has expanded into travel, payments, and other sectors rich in transactional data—empowering advertisers to connect with targeted audiences in relevant moments with personalized messages.
Because commerce media is powered by first-party data, those audiences, moments, and messages are as targeted, relevant, and personalized as possible. A growing number of commerce media platforms also enable a sophisticated omnichannel approach, allowing advertisers to capture audience attention in saturated digital environments.
While non-retail commerce media is still nascent, its swift evolution is opening up new, less-saturated channels for marketers to reach high-intent audiences. In fact, non-retail commerce media is growing even faster than retail media, with ad spend forecast to surpass $100 billion by 2028. It’s a space where innovation—particularly AI-related innovation—is driving rapid expansion.
Considering all this, now is the time for advertising leaders in every sector to get ahead of the curve by understanding the forces driving commerce media’s growth as well as how to leverage the channel strategically.
Marketing teams today are struggling with signal loss, a lack of data readiness, and media fragmentation—all of which make it harder to deliver personalized, timely messages and craft the coordinated omnichannel media strategies that are key to connecting with consumers in today’s crowded digital environment. At the same time, economic volatility is constraining marketing budgets and putting marketing leaders under increased pressure to prove out the value of their investments.
In this environment, commerce media is well-positioned to take on a larger role in marketing budgets. “Commerce media is growing more accessible and attractive to brands outside of CPG and retail as the supply side continues to grow through the collection, organization, and availability of first-party data,” says Jane Frye, VP of Integrated Client Solutions at Basis. And the reliability, accuracy, and abundance of this data make it possible for advertisers to use commerce media for personalization at scale.
There are also increasing opportunities for advertisers to use that high-quality data for audience targeting beyond a commerce media entity’s site or app to create highly personalized omnichannel advertising experiences. Offsite retail media ad spend, which enables advertisers to activate commerce media audiences beyond a retailer’s site or app, is forecast to grow at double the rate of onsite media spend through 2026, and off-platform placements will account for over 63% of display ad spend by 2029.
Even more, commerce media is well-suited for times of economic uncertainty. As a highly measurable channel, it allows marketers to clearly demonstrate ROI. And while commerce media’s early growth was largely driven by performance marketing, it has since evolved into a full-funnel solution that supports brand-building efforts as well.
Ultimately, these strengths make commerce media not just a timely solution for today’s challenges, but also one that’s aligned with the trajectory of digital advertising.
To capitalize on the commerce media opportunity—whether a team is testing and learning on the channel or executing a large-scale strategy—marketing teams must strategize around fragmentation and a lack of measurement standardization, while also prioritizing data readiness and preparing for how the rise of agentic commerce will transform the channel.
The commerce media marketplace is growing increasingly crowded. One way to simplify the space is to limit the number of networks in play. As such, advertisers should carefully evaluate which networks can deliver the most value.
Many new entrants offer access to first-party data but lack the infrastructure to support meaningful advertising outcomes. Marketers should strike a balance between testing emerging platforms with low barriers to entry and investing in more established players with comprehensive ad solutions.
At the same time, there are some meaningful advantages to diversifying spend across a variety of platforms. A diversified strategy is the most effective approach for brand building, says Frye, as channels thrive on the cumulative effect of many small exposures. It also ensures advertisers are not over-relying on a single platform or data source, which mitigates risk and gives teams the flexibility to optimize based on performance.
To help their teams succeed in an increasingly fragmented landscape—both within commerce media and across the broader digital ecosystem—advertising leaders must take steps to reduce the complexity it creates. Tools that reduce manual labor, streamline parts of the campaign process, and unify often-disjointed systems like reporting and billing can help teams operate more efficiently and adapt to new opportunities.
High-quality data is one of commerce media’s most compelling advantages. As the space evolves, marketing teams are finding smart ways to maximize and extend that data. Tools like data clean rooms are opening up new opportunities for data collaboration, with advertisers combining data from commerce media networks, advertising platforms, and publishers with their own first-party data to drive more sophisticated strategies.
To fully capitalize on these opportunities, teams must refine how they collect, organize, store, and activate their data. This is closely tied to the broader challenge of digital advertising fragmentation and resulting tech stack sprawl: When data is siloed across a variety of tools, it becomes difficult to extract meaningful value. With over 50% of agency marketers using eight or more tools to manage client campaigns and 40% using 10 or more tools, unifying data across platforms should be a top priority for marketing teams aiming to succeed not only in commerce media, but across their broader marketing efforts. This is especially true when it comes to harnessing and operationalizing AI: Since AI outputs are only as good as their inputs, marketing teams need access to large volumes of unified, high-quality data to get reliable and differentiated outputs from their AI tools.
Another key consideration for advertisers investing in commerce media is the rise of agentic AI and agentic commerce. Agentic AI’s ability to independently research, compare, and execute purchases on behalf of consumers is poised to change how products are discovered and bought—and, by extension, how commerce media functions as a channel. Marketers who get ahead of this shift will have a meaningful advantage over their competitors.
Consumer interest in AI-assisted shopping is already significant: In late 2024, 71% of US shoppers—and 84% of Gen Z shoppers—expressed interest in using an AI agent to make purchases on their behalf once items hit a target price. Meanwhile, major AI platforms are actively building commerce capabilities that could eventually compete with what retail media has long owned at the lower funnel: Both OpenAI and Perplexity, for example, are building out fully agentic commerce infrastructure. However, OpenAI’s recent scaling back of their plans to integrate checkout directly into ChatGPT suggests that even the most well-resourced AI companies are finding it difficult to own the full purchase journey. Retail media giants, meanwhile, are leaning in on their own agentic bets: Walmart, for example, has introduced Marty, a new agentic capability built to help advertisers manage billing and bidding for their sponsored search campaigns.
As consumers increasingly rely on AI agents to research and buy on their behalf, brands and retailers will need to ensure their products are discoverable and purchasable by those agents in addition to human shoppers. This means auditing websites, product catalogs, and digital assets to verify they’re optimized for AI systems as well as human visitors, including structured data, clean APIs, and metadata-rich content that AI agents can easily parse and act on. Equally important is keeping a pulse on how this space develops, as the agentic commerce space is evolving quickly and the strategies that work today may need to be revisited as new platforms, capabilities, and consumer behaviors emerge.
Commerce media addresses many of the challenges advertisers are grappling with today, offering precision, scale, and omnichannel activation. At the same time, its measurability is a significant advantage at a time when marketers are under increasing pressure to prove performance.
To fully realize the channel’s potential, marketing leaders must take care to invest in the right partners, unify fragmented systems, build robust and streamlined data ecosystems, and prepare for how agentic AI will change the landscape. By taking these steps, teams can unlock the full value of commerce media—not only to meet current challenges, but to set the stage for sustainable growth in the years to come.
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Commerce media isn’t the only space that AI is set to transform: The technology is also poised to reshape how marketers work on a fundamental level. To find out how teams are actually navigating that shift, we surveyed professionals from leading brands and agencies about the tools they're using, where the technology is delivering, and where the gaps remain. Check out AI and the Future of Marketing for all the findings.