Retail Media’s Next Test: Breaking out of its silos

The IAB Connected Commerce Summit, held April 14 in New York City, felt like an important temperature check for the industry.

SMG has attended this event since its inception in 2023, and it’s been an interesting year-over-year view of how commerce media is evolving. Some hypotheticals have become reality, others are still stuck in the discussion phase. Yet it’s clear that everyone — retailers, brands, agencies, and technology providers — is pushing for retail media to mature.

Commerce media no longer needs to justify why it exists. That case has been made and its effectiveness proven. The bigger question now is whether the industry is prepared to do the harder work that comes next.

Collin Colburn, Vice President of Commerce Media at the IAB, set that tone well in the opening session. Commerce media is growing, the market is moving, and there is still plenty of momentum behind it. But maturity asks more of everyone. It asks for sharper choices, clearer operating models, better transparency, and a lot less hiding behind complexity.

That came through repeatedly across the day.

I had the chance to moderate a panel with leaders from across retail, brand, and measurement, and one issue kept surfacing in different forms: too much of the industry is still working in silos. Media here. Merchandising there. Loyalty in another corner. Store operations somewhere else again.

That fragmentation slows everything down. It makes retailers harder to work with, harder to understand, and harder for brands to back with confidence.

The strongest point made on stage was that successful Commerce Media Networks are not built by piling on more placements. They are built by getting the organization aligned around one commercial goal and then making that easy for brands to plug into. When media, merchandising, loyalty, and stores are working from the same plan, you start to connect media to the shelf in a way that actually matters.

That is where orchestration comes in.

For me, this is the next chapter for CMNs. The opportunity is not in treating on-site, off-site, and in-store as separate workstreams and hoping they add up. It is in planning them together from the start, measuring them together, and being honest about the role each one plays.

In-store was a big part of that discussion, and rightly so.

Too often, in-store still gets treated like the awkward extra in the room. Everyone agrees it matters, but many are still approaching it too cautiously. Testing, piloting, debating, overcomplicating. Meanwhile, the simple truth remains: the store is where most purchases still happen, and for many shoppers it is also where discovery happens.

That point landed particularly well during the in-store conversations. Retail media still carries a heavy e-commerce influence, and that shows up in the way people think about KPIs, planning, and measurement. But stores are different environments. They are not just a conversion point. They shape what people notice, what they consider, and what they buy on impulse. They can absolutely create strong brand experiences when used well.

We need to stop waiting for in-store to be perfect before taking it seriously.

The measurement challenge is real, but it is not a reason to stall. There are already credible ways to measure impact — our team is doing it at WHS Media. The bigger issue is often organizational, not technical. Different teams own different budgets. Different teams use different language. Different teams are still solving for different outcomes.

And this is why in-store remains such an untapped opportunity for so many retailers in 2026.

A few other themes stood out too. Brands are increasingly looking for useful signals, not just more media to buy. Transparency still matters, especially once campaigns move beyond on-site environments. And there was a healthy recognition that standardization does not mean every network has to look the same. It won’t, and it shouldn’t.

Retailers have different strengths, different shoppers, and different reasons to win.

What matters is having a clear point of view on where you play, how you create value, and how you make it easy for brands to see that value quickly.

My main takeaway from the day was pretty simple. Commerce media has proven it belongs. Now it has to prove it can operate in a more joined-up way.

That means breaking down silos. Planning media holistically. Treating in-store as a real part of the media mix, not a side conversation. And getting much more comfortable with doing the work before every piece is fully polished.

And that is where the next wave of growth will come from.