Commerce media is pushing brands to break down internal silos and rethink how they organize teams, allocate budgets, and measure success across an increasingly fragmented ecosystem.

"We're entering a new phase of maturity for commerce media," Jason Colon, executive vice president of commerce media at Horizon Commerce, said during EMARKETER's Ad Buyer Strategies Summit in conversation with our analyst Suzy Davidkhanian. "When we see brands execute commerce media with strong strategy, it's clear that commerce media has the potential to both build brand and drive transactions and to do so at scale."

Suzy Davidkhanian and Jason Colon at EMARKETER's Ad Buyer Summit

The conversation brought together Colon, James Clarke, head of media at Newell Brands, and Mark Grether, senior vice president and general manager at PayPal Ads, to discuss how commerce media is reshaping the marketing landscape. Their insights reveal how brands are navigating organizational change, measurement challenges, and new opportunities in a space where traditional boundaries between brand building and performance marketing are dissolving.

Organizational structure determines success

Where commerce media sits within a company reveals how seriously brands take the channel. Traditionally, commerce media lived within shopper marketing, e-commerce, or sales departments, positioning that often limited it to conversion-focused activities.

Newell Brands takes a different approach. Clarke's team, called "total media and partnerships," manages commerce media alongside paid national advertising, influencer marketing, and affiliate programs. This structure enables more impartial budget decisions and holistic media planning.

"It's allowed us to make more impartial trade offs versus in other organizations I've worked, you end up sometimes playing politics a little bit more in terms of protecting certain channels versus truly doing what's right for the business," Clarke said.

The organizational placement of commerce media directly impacts strategic flexibility. Brands that integrate commerce media into broader marketing functions can more easily balance brand-building and conversion objectives, while those keeping it siloed in sales or e-commerce may struggle to leverage its full potential.

Fragmentation creates measurement complexity

The commerce media ecosystem now includes hundreds of retail media networks, financial media platforms, and shoppable content environments. This fragmentation overwhelms marketers trying to determine where to allocate budgets.

Grether said PayPal's horizontal view across 30 million merchants and 400 million consumers provides a solution. According to him, the platform sees approximately 20-25% of all global commerce, roughly three times the transaction data of Amazon, spanning all categories and channels.

"We see it across all the categories. And this gives us a much richer understanding of consumers, of what they are buying, what they are buying next, what correlates with each other," Grether said.

He said this comprehensive view enables PayPal to advise both CMOs and CFOs. CFOs care about market share and want to know how much to spend to increase it, while CMOs need guidance on where to deploy those dollars for maximum incrementality.

Measurement requires better tools and communication

Brands are simultaneously improving measurement capabilities and getting better at explaining what they're measuring. New clean room ecosystems, faster incrementality testing, and advanced attribution models provide more sophisticated insights than traditional methods.

However, measurement sophistication means nothing without organizational alignment. Clarke said Newell Brands addresses this by bringing together brand teams, sales, finance, and media stakeholders early in the planning process.

"By securing that alignment upstream that allows us to then take actions with confidence," Clarke said. The company might deliberately accept lower return on ad spend or softer incrementality to gain market share during critical periods like back-to-school season, but these are conscious trade-offs made with full stakeholder buy-in.

Technical measurement capabilities matter less than organizational consensus on objectives. Brands that align stakeholders on goals and KPIs before campaigns launch can make strategic trade-offs confidently, while those lacking alignment struggle with internal politics regardless of measurement sophistication.

Discovery is shifting

Commerce media is expanding beyond traditional retail media networks into content discovery environments. Newell Brands is leaning into areas where commerce and creative intersect: influencer content in shoppable environments, retail-enabled connected TV through Amazon and Walmart's Vizio acquisition, and new models like TikTok Shop.

The rise of AI-powered discovery is changing where brands should invest. Colon advises clients to think beyond media placement to consider whether their next dollar should go into another ad or into product content, ratings, and reviews that shape brand narratives in AI discovery environments.

"Does my dollar go into another search ad, another programmatic ad, or do I need to focus on creating stronger product content, focus on building out my ratings and reviews and these different data signals that are really shaping your brand narrative inside of these new discovery environments," Colon said.

PayPal is working to turn any consumer engagement into a shoppable moment, whether on connected TV, the open web, or large language models. This approach converges brand building and conversion into single ad units while enabling better measurement through unified identity.

As consumer journeys increasingly bypass traditional search and merchant websites, brands must rethink resource allocation. Investment in product content and data signals may deliver better returns than additional media spend, particularly as AI reshapes discovery.

Watch the full session.