Retailers have heard the same projections enough times to recite them: commerce media is set to become a $100B+ category and claim a meaningful share of overall ad spend as soon as next year.
While many struggle with implementation, one of my favorite success stories of a commerce media network (CMN) comes from Walmart. Driven largely by Walmart Connect, its CMN uses the company’s first-party shopper data (like browsing behavior and purchase history) to help brands reach consumers both on Walmart’s digital platforms and across the wider web. It goes beyond traditional retail media by applying data to deliver personalized advertising, optimizing campaigns with AI and influencing the entire customer journey from product discovery through post-purchase.
Examples like this illustrate that when it comes to CMNs, retailers and marketplaces hold the key advantage thanks to shopping and transaction-level data. Data provides insights into what shoppers actually buy and how their behavior changes over time, and it’s why CMNs can create high-margin revenue for retailers and strong performance for brands — especially when campaigns are measured against real sales outcomes.
So what are the roadblocks to implementation? Here are five that I’ve seen firsthand, plus practical suggestions to navigate around each.
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Roadblock #1: Underutilized First-Party Data
The foundation of an effective CMN is first-party data, but that advantage only holds if the data is unified, governed and activation-ready.
Consider this example. A brand wants to reach “shoppers who buy protein bars monthly and who recently added fitness apparel to their cart.” Targeting this audience requires tracking both previous purchase history and real-time shopping behavior. If these data points aren’t captured and unified in the same warehouse with consistent identifiers, the retailer can’t identify the ideal audience. Instead, targeting becomes a less-specific either/or exercise (“protein bar buyers” or “fitness cart adders”). The inability to create highly specific, brand-valuable segments is a key reason CMNs often struggle to deliver.
The fix is making data usable for advertising by centralizing it in a modern cloud warehouse and structuring it for activation, not just analytics. That means establishing shared taxonomies across ecommerce, merchandising, loyalty and media teams. Well-defined datasets that map to how brands buy, including SKU-level purchasing patterns, affinity for the category metrics, lifecycle stage data and promotional responsiveness, are crucial. When those foundations are in place, targeting gets sharper, activation gets faster and reporting becomes credible.
Roadblock #2: Manual or Inaccurate Audience Creation
Commerce media has many moving parts, but the “product” at the core is high-intent audiences. When audience creation slows, so does the ability to deliver what CMNs really sell: ready-to-activate demand.
The reality is that many teams still operate in a weeks-long loop. A brief comes in, a request goes to the data team, SQL is written and revised and only then do high-intent audiences surface. Worse, each brand can end up with a slightly different process, making it error-prone and hard to scale. These bottlenecks delay customer engagement and sales conversion, and in today’s climate, advertisers won’t wait. Their budgets will shift to networks that can build and activate audiences in just days or hours.
To clear this roadblock, retailers should treat audience creation as a standardized capability, not a bespoke request to be rebuilt every time. Many are turning to composable architectures that work directly with the retailer’s data cloud to “eliminate the middleman,” so to speak. From there, automation accelerates the creation and delivery of ready-to-activate audiences.
When those audiences are built around brand objectives like “new-to-brand acquisition,” “repeat purchase,” “basket expansion,” or “promotional lift,” rather than a list of attributes, retailers can package demand more efficiently. The result is faster launches, increased sales and targeting that aligns with what advertisers actually want.
Roadblock #3: Fragmented Activation Across Channels
CMNs have evolved beyond sponsored listings. Advertisers increasingly expect multichannel campaigns for the full shopper journey, from product discovery to purchase. They also need the same audience intelligence powering the experience across channels: onsite, offsite, in-store and sometimes CTV.
This point is critical because these touch points play different roles in driving purchases. Onsite placements tend to convert shoppers in the moment; programmatic and social ads often drive discovery; in-store signage reinforces awareness and influences decision-making in real time. When retailers activate the same audience across these channels, they create more cohesive customer journeys and unlock stronger outcomes for advertisers.
When done seamlessly, it’s a dream come true. But in reality, many retailers still run these channels across different teams, tech stacks and audience definitions. Campaigns get stuck in handoffs, approvals drag and measurement arrives too late to influence optimization.
The way forward is to make the audience the connective tissue across the campaign lifecycle. Retailers should ensure the same audience can be activated from one source of truth, rather than recreating and redeploying it for every channel. They should also prioritize mid-flight reporting and optimization so performance in one channel can inform adjustments in another, while the campaign is still live. When activation is unified, commerce media becomes an integrated advertising product that brands can invest in with confidence.
Roadblock #4: Limited or Absent Self-Service
Self-service is no longer a nice-to-have. Amazon Ads set expectations that advertisers should be able to build, launch and measure campaigns without waiting in a managed service queue, meaning that convenience has become part of the competitive bar.
Yet many retailers still lack intuitive self-guided experiences for advertisers to explore audiences, launch onsite media or access performance insights. When everything is routed through a managed service team, capacity becomes a constraint and costs climb.
The answer is guided self-service, rather than “hands off” service. Retailers can enable advertiser-facing workflows for audience exploration, campaign setup and performance reporting, supported by tools like agentic AI designed for non-technical users. At the same time, retailers must ensure campaigns run smoothly across channels, advising on strategy and enforcing governance so activation remains secure and compliant.
Roadblock #5: Measurement that isn’t Fast, Transparent, or Predictive
Closed-loop measurement is commerce media’s biggest promise, but it only matters if it’s delivered with speed and clarity. Advertisers have high expectations that their spend will drive impactful business outcomes. Furthermore, they want continuous insights they can act on, which ultimately drives further investment.
Too often, however, measurement is delayed and siloed. Retailers can overcome this hurdle by building a unified measurement layer that ties onsite and offsite performance back to actual sales, and making near-real-time dashboards accessible through the same self-service experience advertisers use to run campaigns. Over time, the most advanced programs will use these insights to fuel “performance loops,” where results inform the next best audience and campaign. Measurement then becomes a growth engine that helps sell the next buy – a win for the brand and the retailer.
Final Thoughts
Commerce media growth is real, but it isn’t automatic. Advertisers are actively looking for networks that deliver precision, transparency and speed. The retailers that capture outsized share in 2026 will be those focused on operational excellence: unified data, fast audience creation, cross-channel activation, guided self-service and measurement that’s timely and actionable. Those that clear the roadblocks to get there will define what advertising looks like in the commerce media era.
Rebecca Corliss is VP of Marketing at GrowthLoop, a leading composable CDP unlocking data and generative capabilities for marketing teams. Before GrowthLoop, Corliss was one of HubSpot’s first 50 employees during the company’s most foundational years through IPO. Here she led marketing initiatives that helped transform the industry as HubSpot revolutionized how companies do marketing and sales today. After HubSpot, Corliss led marketing for transformative products within the robotics and data industries. Today at GrowthLoop, she explores how the data cloud, martech and AI are bringing a new wave of solutions that will yet again change the marketing landscape.
