Written by Neilson Hall, Managing Director - Commerce at dentsu
The lines are blurring.
As the retail media industry grows, we’re seeing increasing overlaps between media, commerce and customer experience. Traditional silos between brand marketing, shopper marketing and performance media are being tested and customers are breaking out of the journeys we’ve been working with for years. With consumers moving fluidly between platforms, the shopping journey is getting messy and internal fragmentation is becoming a barrier to scaling what’s working.
In this shifting landscape, the next era of growth will be driven by connection, not complexity. The conversation at the Total Commerce Summit focused on what this connection enables, from clearer investment decisions and faster optimisation to a more consistent customer experience across every touchpoint. With experts from across the industry, we discussed connection as a competitive advantage and the idea that brands must look at reducing fragmentation to unlock the full value of retail media.
Responding to these challenges, the first step towards growth has to be a shift from expansion to orchestration. The focus needs to move from asking what more can be done to how can we do what we’re doing even better. Customers experience brands through one connected journey. Yet, behind the scenes, with mismatched internal priorities and disjointed measurement, over 50% of advertisers cite fragmentation as a key barrier to growth. The brands that succeed will be the ones creating stronger connections between the assets they already have, with a clearer link between media investment, customer behaviour and commercial outcomes.
Measurement is a key area we need to work on as an industry. In fact, during a working session with the audience at the Summit, measurement came out at one of the top obstacles preventing businesses from gaining value from retail media. As Jas Mahill, Business Partner at iProspect, explained, “you can have the most brilliant creative, the best tools and technology in the world, but if you can't see clearly what's working, what's not, and why, it's very difficult to see where that next pound should go.” Connected measurement gives brands a true understanding of what’s driving incremental growth and where to allocate budgets for the greatest impact. It also creates the conditions for experimentation by reducing uncertainty and helping teams prove the value of new tactics, channels and partnerships. Without getting the foundations right, there’s no option for innovation. Measurement isn’t just the foundation of retail media maturity, it’s what unlocks future growth.
Ash White (dentsu), Andy Stephen (Criteo) Anup Gohil (iProspect), and David Sequeira (Skai) on a panel at Total Commerce Summit
The same is true for AI in retail media. As Andy Stephen from Criteo presented, consumers are increasingly using AI for product discovery and comparison. Customers now have a new gateway to products – alongside traditional search rankings, retailer shelves or media placements – and brands must also consider how easily AI agents can find, understand and recommend their offering.
But agentic commerce isn’t replacing traditional capabilities; it’s building on them. While customers shop from a more emotional place, with a ‘feeling’ for the brand, agents work on factual data and scraped information. To succeed, brands need to position themselves as a ‘no-brainer’ for agents during the research phase. That relies on accurate, structured and connected information that can be understood by LLMs. The benefit is that products will become more findable and brands can get brought up across the shopping journey, from research to evaluation, with more opportunities to influence purchasing decisions.
Looking outwards, we also have to respond to the fragmentation shoppers are dealing with. Consumers are moving between platforms, between environments and between channels. They’re not staying in these nice distinct journeys we've previously planned for. So, we can’t keep treating touchpoints separately. We need to mirror the way customers interact with our brands – as one unified experience. This is often the missing piece of the puzzle, focusing on the customer’s connected experience. They should be at the heart of everything, the centre-point to join everything else around.
For me, the key takeaway from the day was that the future of commerce will be defined by who can connect their channels, retail media partnerships and customer data to better reflect how customers actually shop and buy.
The opportunity isn’t simply to add more activity. It’s to remove friction in what you’re already doing. Media investments should be connected to business outcomes, data should be structured to support both measurement and AI-drive discover and customer experiences should be consistent across channels. The brands that solve those disconnects first will be the ones best positioned for the next wave of growth.
