The Evolving Commerce Media Landscape
Retail media has shifted from short-term, transaction-focused buys to full-funnel commerce media that competes for brand budgets. Retailers now sit on high-value purchase intent signals and shopper relationships while marketplaces, demand-side platforms and identity providers deliver reach and technical scale. The fundamental question for leaders is simple: which capabilities must you own to defend your value, and which should you source from the ecosystem?
Own Your Unique Assets
Keep in-house the assets that are defensible and directly tied to commerce outcomes. These include:
- First-party data sets: purchase history, cart behavior, loyalty profiles and POS signals.
- Onsite and in-store environments: product pages, checkout, digital shelf and store screens where purchase intent is highest.
- High-intent moments: search-to-buy and basket events that drive immediate conversions.
- Commercial controls: pricing, inventory-aware placements and category-level sponsorships.
Partner for Broader Reach and Efficiency
Use partners where scale, standardization or specialized tech deliver faster value than building internally. Typical partnership areas are:
- Identity and measurement frameworks that provide cross-channel attribution and comparable metrics.
- Offsite distribution for awareness and upper-funnel reach via programmatic and social channels.
- Optimization platforms and ad tech for creative testing, bidding and campaign automation.
- Compliance and privacy tooling, including consent management and privacy-preserving analytics.
The Hybrid Advantage
A hybrid model lets retailers protect what drives commerce outcomes while tapping partners to scale, standardize and accelerate. AI shifts the balance by automating segmentation, personalizing creative and improving measurement with privacy-safe models. That creates a faster path to ROI for retailers that own core signals and plug partner capabilities into a governed platform. Build an evolving capability set: own data, moments and commercial control; partner for reach, identity and advanced tooling; focus organizationally on measurement, sales enablement, creative standards and operational governance. That approach turns a retail media initiative into a durable commerce media business.
