By Lee LeFeuvre, Interim CEO, SMG
Every industry reaches a point where the excitement of what could be meets the reality of making it happen. Commerce media may be at that point now. The opportunity is clear, but connecting the different parts of the ecosystem remains a challenge.
At SMG’s recent Retail Media Leadership Summit, a gathering of industry leaders from across the globe in Windsor, Professor Damian Hughes, an expert in organisational behaviour and high-performing teams, explored what he described as the “messy middle” of transformation. It is the point where people have travelled too far to turn back, but not far enough to see the finish. Morale can dip, patience can wear thin, and what once looked straightforward begins to feel complicated.
That description feels particularly relevant to commerce media. The opportunity is no longer hypothetical, and retailers have established media businesses, brands are looking more closely at commerce outcomes, and agencies increasingly consider retail media alongside other channels. Yet the practical work of connecting these parts of the ecosystem remains unfinished.
The challenge for us now is that proving a proposition and building a connected market are two very different tasks.
Building a better-connected future
Commerce media has grown through innovation and differentiation. Retailers have developed audiences, formats and propositions shaped by their customers and environments. That variety is valuable, but it also means advertisers can face different processes for planning, activation and measurement as they work across partners.
The Commerce Media Connection Gap, new research from SMG, IAB, and IAB UK, examines the disconnect between the ambition for connected commerce media and the realities of delivering it. One finding is that 46% of brands link increased commerce media spending to proven return on investment. It is a reminder that confidence in outcomes matters when advertisers decide where to invest.
When onsite, offsite and in-store activity are planned separately, even strong individual campaigns can be harder to evaluate as part of a coherent whole. The opportunity for the industry is to make those connections easier without stripping away what makes each retailer distinctive.
That is where orchestration becomes meaningful: not as a fashionable label for another layer of technology, but as the less glamorous work of aligning objectives, people, workflows and evidence.
Ask better questions
One of Hughes’ most useful challenges was that leaders should spend less time arriving with answers and more time asking better questions. He warned against relying on fear, authority or an avalanche of facts to persuade people to embrace change. Information matters, but it does not automatically become action.
The same principle applies across commerce media. We know fragmentation exists. Repeating that diagnosis will not resolve it. More productive questions might be: What does an agency have to repeat each time it works with another network? Which measures can partners agree on before a campaign begins? Where does a handover create avoidable delay? And what would a genuinely connected experience look like from the advertiser’s perspective?
These questions shift attention from who owns a particular part of the process to what the process needs to achieve. They also create room for different participants to contribute without pretending they all have identical priorities.
Trust is part of the infrastructure
In a separate discussion at the summit, five-time Olympic champion Dame Laura Kenny offered another perspective on collaboration. Reflecting on her time in British Cycling, Kenny described a team in which trust made honest feedback possible. Teammates could point out when something had not worked because the conversation was about improving together, not assigning blame.
Commerce media is not an elite sport, but the underlying lesson is useful. A connected market depends on people being able to challenge assumptions, acknowledge constraints and make decisions around shared outcomes.
Retailers bring distinctive customer relationships and environments. Brands bring commercial priorities and accountability for growth. Agencies bring a cross-channel view of investment and execution. Technology partners can help reduce friction between them. None can deliver the whole experience in isolation.
Collaboration cannot mean asking every participant to surrender their interests. Instead, it means being explicit about the shared goal, understanding what others need to deliver it, and making the work easier across organisational boundaries.
Progress without pretending
Hughes cautioned against presenting change as a neat upward line. When reality turns out to be more complicated than the promised journey, trust is often the first casualty. A more credible approach is to anticipate setbacks and decide how to respond to them.
For commerce media leaders, that might mean acknowledging that consistent measurement will take sustained coordination, that technical integration will not remove every operational challenge, and that some approaches will need to evolve as buyers’ expectations change.
It also means recognising progress already made. Hughes encouraged leaders to ask not only what remains broken, but what is working now that was difficult before. That is a valuable discipline for an industry whose debates can sometimes be dominated by the distance still to travel.
Better conversations between retailers and agencies, clearer definitions, more comparable measurement approaches and simpler buying processes may not generate the excitement of a new launch. But each can make the next stage of growth more achievable.
What makes the industry’s growth possible
Perhaps the most useful lesson from “the messy middle” is that progress does not always require another ambitious vision. Sometimes it requires the willingness to question how things are being done today.
For commerce media, that means looking beyond the next product launch, partnership or investment milestone and examining the everyday experiences that determine whether the industry is genuinely moving forward. Is it becoming easier for an agency to plan across retailers? Can a brand understand what its investment has achieved? Are we solving problems together, or simply passing them between organisations?
These are not necessarily the questions that generate the most exciting headlines. But they may be the ones that matter most.
Damian Hughes challenged us to reconsider the questions we ask when navigating change. Perhaps commerce media should do the same. Instead of asking how quickly the industry can grow, we should be asking what we’re prepared to change to make that growth possible.
Read more viewpoints from Retail Media Age’s editorial staff and expert commentators in our RMA columns.
