The Future of Commerce Media: What Brand Marketers Need to Prepare For
The Commerce Media Landscape, Right Now
It's worth orienting to where things stand before projecting forward. Commerce media — broadly defined as advertising that connects brand investment to measurable purchase behavior — has become one of the fastest-growing segments in the entire advertising industry. Retail media networks have proliferated from a handful of meaningful players to over 80 networks in the U.S. alone. Streaming services are developing commerce-enabled ad formats. Social platforms are building native checkout. And the line between content and commerce is getting blurrier by the month.
For brand marketers, this growth is both an opportunity and a source of genuine complexity. More networks mean more choices, more learning curves, more reporting interfaces, and more budget allocation decisions. The question isn't whether commerce media matters — that battle was settled. The question is how to navigate what comes next.
Five Forces Shaping Commerce Media Through 2027
1. The Consolidation of Retail Media Networks
The explosion of retail media networks was always going to resolve into consolidation. Eighty-plus networks is an operationally unsustainable number for most brand teams to actively manage. What's already beginning — and will accelerate — is a bifurcation between tier-one networks with genuine scale and data depth, and tier-two networks that will need to aggregate or differentiate to survive.
For brands, this means the portfolio of networks worth investing in at scale will likely narrow. The ones that will justify continued investment will be those that offer genuine first-party data moats, measurable incrementality at the campaign level, and programmatic access via clean room and data collaboration infrastructure that doesn't require excessive manual management.
The practical implication: brands should be building deeper expertise in fewer networks rather than spreading thin budgets across every network that has a sales team. The learning curves are steep, the algorithm optimization takes time, and the compounding advantage of sustained investment in a network is real.
2. The Clean Room Becomes the New Data Infrastructure
Third-party data deprecation, which has been a slow-moving regulatory and technical transformation for years, is finally hitting the operational reality of commerce media. Brands that have relied on probabilistic targeting are discovering that their targeting precision is eroding. Retailers that built data businesses on third-party enrichment are rethinking their data infrastructure.
Data clean rooms — secure environments where first-party data from different parties can be analyzed together without either party seeing the other's raw data — are the infrastructure that makes privacy-compliant data collaboration possible at scale. The major retail media networks are building clean room capabilities. The major ad platforms are developing them. And brands are starting to invest in the technical and legal infrastructure to participate.
This is not a trend that resolves in the near term. But brands that start building the data governance frameworks, partnership agreements, and analytical capabilities to operate in a clean room environment will have a meaningful advantage over those that don't.
3. AI-Powered Creative Production at Commerce Scale
The volume of creative assets required to operate effectively in modern commerce media is staggering. Every retail media network has different format specifications. Every placement within a network has different creative requirements. Seasonal promotions require asset refreshes. A/B testing requires variant production. All of it adds up to a production burden that overwhelms traditional creative workflows.
Generative AI is already changing the economics of this problem. Not by replacing strategic creative thinking — the big idea, the brand voice, the cultural insight — but by dramatically accelerating the production of variations, adaptations, and format-specific derivatives.
The brands and agencies that figure out how to integrate AI production tools into a creative workflow that still produces strategically coherent, brand-consistent output will be able to operate at a pace and scale that traditionally resourced teams simply can't match. The ones that adopt AI tools without that strategic layer will produce volume without quality — a fast path to creative clutter.
4. Connected TV Becomes a Commerce Channel
CTV has moved from a brand awareness vehicle to an increasingly measurable commerce channel faster than most media plans have adapted to. The convergence of streaming, retail data, and shoppable formats is creating a new class of commerce touchpoint that sits somewhere between traditional television and performance media.
Platforms are developing CTV ad units that allow viewers to add products to their cart with a remote or a QR code. Retail media networks are developing off-site extensions that connect streaming inventory to their first-party shopper data. And the attribution infrastructure — which has historically been CTV's weakness — is improving as connected device IDs link streaming exposure to purchase data at the individual household level.
For CPG brands that have treated CTV purely as a reach vehicle, this shift requires a rethink. The creative implications are significant — ads designed to generate brand awareness in a lean-back viewing environment function differently from ads designed to prompt immediate commerce action. The planning implications are equally significant: CTV needs to be in the commerce planning conversation, not just the brand media conversation.
5. Measurement Gets Harder Before It Gets Easier
The promise of commerce media has always been attribution — the ability to connect advertising investment to purchase behavior in a way that traditional brand media couldn't. That promise is real, but the measurement environment is getting more complicated before it gets cleaner.
Cross-retailer attribution is genuinely hard. A shopper sees a retail media ad on Instacart but buys the product at Walmart. The ad drove the sale, but neither retailer's attribution model captures it. Multi-touch attribution across digital, social, streaming, and in-store touchpoints requires data infrastructure that most brands don't yet have.
The honest answer is that perfect attribution is a horizon, not a destination. The brands that will navigate this environment best are the ones that commit to a measurement framework they can actually operationalize — incrementality testing where possible, media mix modeling for the bigger picture, and a set of proxy metrics that they've validated are leading indicators of real business outcomes.
What to Build Now
Given those five forces, what should brand marketing teams actually be doing to prepare? A few priorities that are actionable in the near term:
Invest in first-party data infrastructure
Every consumer touchpoint — your brand website, your eCRM program, your sampling activations, your retail media campaigns that generate new-to-brand buyer data — is an opportunity to build a proprietary data asset. The brands that have invested in this systematically will have a significant advantage as the third-party data ecosystem continues to erode.
Build commerce media expertise internally or through a dedicated partner
The complexity of the retail media landscape requires genuine expertise to navigate. Brands that spread this work across generalist media agencies without deep retail media experience, or that staff it with junior team members who are learning on the job, will be consistently outmaneuvered by those who've built real capability.
Rethink creative production as a capability, not a project
The creative demands of modern commerce media require a production model — an ongoing capability for producing, testing, and iterating assets at scale — rather than the campaign-by-campaign project model that most brand teams still operate on. Building that capability, whether in-house or through a commerce-specific creative partner, is one of the highest-leverage investments a brand team can make right now.
Get close to your retail partners
The brands that will have the best access to retail media inventory, first-look opportunities on new ad products, and favorable data-sharing terms are the brands that have invested in genuine retailer relationships at the senior level. Commerce media strategy and retail customer development strategy are not separate tracks — they need to be integrated.
A Note on Pace
Commerce media is moving faster than most planning cycles are designed to accommodate. Annual brand planning processes that set commerce media strategy in November for execution in January are going to miss opportunities that materialize in March and misallocate budgets based on a market context that doesn't exist by Q3.
The organizational adaptation required here is genuine: faster planning cycles, more dynamic budget allocation, quarterly strategic reviews that actually change things rather than just reporting on them. That's a cultural shift as much as a process one. But it's the shift that separates brands that are participating in the future of commerce media from those that are reading about it.
Agency Five Eighty builds commerce media strategies for brands that want to win today and be positioned for what comes next. From retail media activation to CTV commerce integration and first-party data strategy, we manage the full picture — because the future of commerce is already here.