The End of 'More Networks' in Commerce Media: Winning Through Reduced Friction and Data-Driven Decisions
It's tempting to view the current moment in commerce media as another chapter in digital growth. The numbers seem to support this narrative. In the United States, advertising spending on retail media could reach $71.09 billion by 2026, according to a December 2025 forecast by EMARKETER cited in an analysis from McKinsey. Globally, the retail media market could approach $180 billion by 2025, while the broader category of commerce media is expected to surpass $176 billion by 2028.
However, the significant signal here isn't size; it's the market's fundamental shift. McKinsey describes a turning point: the sector is transitioning from rapid expansion to a strategic maturity characterized by consolidation, a demand for results, and, above all, an increasing need for "full-stack" approaches. In operational terms, it’s no longer sufficient to sell ads in a closed environment; there must be connectivity between data, activation, measurement, and automation that allows corporate buyers to execute seamlessly without internal friction.
I see this as a real shift in client dynamics. For years, the client seemed to be "the budget" and their enthusiasm. Today, the client is the advertiser's organization with its constraints: multiple teams, diverse budget sources, various networks, and multiple definitions of success. When that client becomes central, the winning strategy shifts from "adding surfaces" to "reducing friction."
Deceleration is Not Weakness, It's Natural Selection
McKinsey points to a clear deceleration: spending on commerce media is projected to drop from a 20% CAGR over the past three years to 14% over the next three. Still, this growth rate outpaces overall digital advertising (9%) and, more significantly, stands in stark contrast to the contraction of traditional advertising (negative CAGR of 5%). This arithmetic aligns with a classic maturation pattern: when a category stops relying on novelty, every dollar demands justification.
This shift becomes even clearer with a symbolic milestone highlighted by EMARKETER: commerce media surpassed TV spending in 2025. Beyond the headline, this changes internal expectations. When a budget line becomes “core,” the governance standards rise. Performance audits emerge, attribution reviews take place, consistency across regions is demanded, and direct comparisons with other growth levers become commonplace.
Here enters the nuance that is often overlooked. The primary challenge is no longer merely finding the budget; it’s about defending it in an environment where companies are reallocating resources from digital video, CTV, and OTT towards commerce media (22%), from display (20%), from social (18%), and from search (15%), according to McKinsey’s framework. These percentages describe movement but also underscore tension: every shift comes with a new internal contract over which KPIs dictate action.
When growth moderates, the category stops being forgiving. The platforms and networks that survive are not the ones that promise greater reach, but those that offer lower coordination costs for advertisers and greater certainty in measurement. The rest becomes mere “inventory” in a market where inventory is no longer scarce.
Fragmentation: The True Tax Paid by Advertisers
The figure that best explains the operational pain is not Amazon's or Walmart's market share. It is this: 85% of CPG brands already invest in four or more retail media networks, each with its own taxonomy and measurement standards, according to the analysis cited by McKinsey. This is a direct tax on execution.
In theory, more networks mean more opportunities to reach shoppers. In practice, they create more invisible work: reconciling nomenclature, normalizing reports, reconciling results, holding endless discussions on attribution, and endless “translations” between teams. This unseen work is not borne by a single budget line; it is borne by the entire organization in terms of hours, delays, and tardy decisions.
McKinsey also details the anatomy of this budgetary chaos: funding is no longer owned by just one stakeholder. 74% of organizations use brand budgets and upper funnel; 60% have dedicated retail media budgets; 55% leverage eCommerce; and 54% utilize performance budgets. Nearly 47.5% of advertisers pull resources from two or three budgets, and almost a third from four or more.
This budgetary fragmentation alters the game for commerce media networks. They no longer sell to a single buyer. They sell to an internal coalition: branding seeks value creation, performance demands immediate returns, eCommerce wants commercial efficiency, and retail media aims for share within the retailer. If the network fails to help align these priorities through reliable measurement and a straightforward decision flow, the advertiser isn’t “buying media”; they’re buying friction.
From my innovation lens, this is the most intriguing aspect: the end user of the system is not the consumer who clicks. It is the team that must manage complexity without losing control. In a “buyer-led” market, as framed by McKinsey, those who reduce cognitive and political load become indispensable.
Consolidation is Decided Not by Size, but by Orchestration Capability
McKinsey depicts a landscape where Amazon and Walmart control over 75% of retail media. Amazon maintains structural advantages and is expanding into television, live sports, and media outside its environment, bolstered by its Authenticated Graph that connects advertisers with 90% of U.S. households. Walmart, on the other hand, emerges as the competitive story to watch as it leverages its omnichannel scale and strength in grocery, while also expanding ambitiously with the acquisition of Vizio.
It would be easy to settle into the narrative of “two giants and the rest.” But the fine point lies in how this advantage evolves. McKinsey suggests that the natural boundaries of closed environments are pushing towards partnerships and off-site expansions. A clear example is Instacart's partnership with Google, alongside Amazon's own Authenticated Graph.
This exposes an uncomfortable truth for many networks: growth is no longer unlocked by “more inventory within the retailer,” but by data connectivity and measurement consistency across search, social, video, and retail. In other words, competitive advantage is not sustained merely by traffic; it is driven by the ability to be a complete system.
The financial consequence is direct. When a network only sells exposure, it gets trapped in CPM comparisons and quarterly negotiations. When it sells an integrated system of activation and measurement, it can capture budgets that previously lived in other silos and better withstand the pressure for cuts.
It also shifts the type of innovation that matters. The relevant “innovation” here is not a new ad format but a real reduction in planning times, an improvement in data quality, or attribution that CFOs won’t reject as inconsistent. It’s innovation as a resolution to operational frictions, not merely aesthetic novelty.
AI Stops Being an Experiment When the Channel Becomes Unmanageable Without It
McKinsey frames another displacement: AI is transitioning from optimization to an essential infrastructure, accelerating how products are discovered and how campaigns are optimized and measured. The concept of agentic commerce also emerges, where AI agents play a more active role in purchase journeys, opening new surfaces for discovery and monetization.
At this point, it is advisable to maintain sobriety. AI in commerce media does not succeed by being “smart.” It wins when it enables actions that, at human scale, have become impractical: managing hundreds of combinations of audiences, creatives, retailers, placements, and objectives consistently. With 85% of CPGs on four or more networks, the bottleneck is not a lack of ideas; it’s the impossibility of operating.
Here emerges the full-stack criterion that McKinsey emphasizes: AI is ineffective if it is treated as an accessory. It must exist within a system that connects planning, buying, measurement, and learning. Otherwise, the advertiser ends up with “models” that generate reports but do not reduce the decision cycle.
Real innovation, then, becomes uncomfortable for organizations. It requires a kind of “selective amnesia” in the business sense: forgetting the tool fetish and redesigning the process around the internal customer problem. The problem is concrete: too many budget sources, too many definitions of success, too many platforms, too much manual work. Well-implemented AI is a way to convert that disorder into a repeatable decision flow.
The maturity test in 2026, as suggested by the briefing, will not be who can announce more capabilities, but who can achieve trust. “Reliable measurement” and “omnichannel activation” emerge as key differentiators. Trust is the least glamorous and most scarce word when investment is spread among teams that audit each other.
What the Corporate Buyer is Contracting is No Longer Reach, but Governability
The strategic pivot that the briefing succinctly outlines for 2026 is clear: connectivity over expansion, orchestration over proliferation, transformation over optimization. That language may sound abstract, but in the trenches, it means something very specific: the advertiser is purchasing the ability to execute without being paralyzed by its own complexity.
For leaders of commerce media networks, the mandate is to build products and services that reduce friction among teams, unify measurement, and make data interoperable. For advertisers, the mandate is equally demanding: design internal governance that does not treat commerce media as just “another channel,” but as an architecture that bridges brand, performance, and eCommerce.
From the consumer behavior perspective, this point is the most interesting to me because it reveals a paradox. The entire sector justifies its existence by being closer to the purchase act and the shopper. But the competitive battle is increasingly being decided in the advertiser’s back office: in their ability to coordinate budgets, translate metrics, and sustain decisions.
The success of this new era demonstrates that the true work the corporate user is contracting in commerce media is not to purchase ads within retailers, but to convert dispersed complexity into measurable growth without operational friction.
