Retail media has exploded into one of the fastest-growing opportunities in marketing, so much so that the term describing it has now expanded to the more encompassing “commerce media.”
“Retail media was really the spark that got us going, and commerce media is the expansion of that to where we are today,” explains Jeff Cohen, the former Principal Evangelist for Amazon Ads, on this week’s episode of the Retail Remix podcast. “When I think of commerce media, it’s the connection of the full customer journey and the flattening of that journey. The term commerce recognizes that shoppers are no longer sitting within those silos. As consumers are moving more fluidly between discovery and consideration and purchase, which can happen sometimes within seconds and sometimes within weeks, commerce media brings all those touch points together to really allow brands to measure and optimize that entire path.”
Cohen shares insights from his time building one of Amazon’s first third-party ad technologies to now, in his new role as Chief Business Development Officer at Skai, where he is helping brands navigate a new era of connected, data-driven commerce.
“One of the reasons I left Amazon and wanted to come into the tech world was because I started to see this connectivity between not just what was happening within the walled gardens of retail media, but the impact that social is having,” he said. “By that I mean what is happening when people are searching on Google or product discovering on Pinterest, and of course TikTok can be thrown into this mix as well.”
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Listen in to hear:
- The impact of AI-powered shopping on marketing and how brands can move beyond walled gardens to reach today’s omnichannel shoppers;
- The role of agentic AI in optimizing campaigns and connecting fragmented data;
- What brands can learn from Amazon’s retail media dominance and Skai’s cross-channel approach;
- Why unified, actionable data matters more than endless metrics;
- Lessons on innovation, adaptation and taking smart risks from Jeff’s eclectic career.
Check out the full episode here or anywhere you get your podcasts:
