Commerce media has ambitions beyond the bottom of the funnel. But expanding into CTV, social, and the open web does not automatically make it a full-funnel channel.

That was one of the central discussion topics at EMARKETER’s Future of Digital summit last week.

Commerce signals can help advertisers understand and reach consumers well before they are ready to buy. But brands already have direct relationships with search engines, social platforms, video providers, and publishers. Commerce media networks need to prove what they add to those investments, particularly as they ask advertisers to accept more cost and complexity.

Commerce data can travel up the funnel

Commerce media’s strongest argument for a larger role may be the data behind it.

“Historically, it's been this lower of the funnel tactic: have I driven the immediate sale? Now it's an intelligence layer we're able to apply across the full funnel,” said Stephanie Desai, vice president of sales at Verve, a global ad tech company.

Verve combines signals such as open-web searches, AI searches, and zero-party polling to identify intent that can inform CTV targeting, social messaging, and open-web campaigns. Those signals can emerge well before a consumer searches for a specific product. Someone researching prenatal vitamins or asking AI to design a nursery has signaled a life stage that makes them receptive to baby products long before they start shopping.

For marketers, that expands the value of commerce data beyond identifying consumers who are already close to a transaction. It can help brands decide whom to reach and what to tell them earlier in the funnel.

But having that capability doesn't mean brands are reorganizing their media plans around it.

Organizational silos are slowing convergence

Commerce media and channels such as social were supposed to converge quickly. They haven't.

“We kind of went into the year thinking that there would be this, you know, rapid kind of collision between the two things, and for the most part that has yet to happen,” said Max Willens, principal analyst at EMARKETER.

One obstacle is organizational. Brands and agencies have spent years building teams around specific channels, each with its own budgets, responsibilities, and KPIs. Asking those teams to work in service of another media organization introduces friction.

Social platforms are also pushing advertisers toward automated ad buying systems, which can reduce the appeal of bringing detailed retailer audience targeting into a campaign. That puts more pressure on commerce media networks to offer something marketers cannot easily get by buying directly.

Willens pointed to retailers developing creator storefronts, affiliate programs, and tools that connect social content directly to product pages. But simply giving advertisers another way to access inventory or creators isn't enough.

“There's got to be a lot of specificity in the sort of purpose and approach,” he said.

Retail media has to earn the budget

For Nanit, that differentiation is already influencing where it spends. The baby-tech company invests in retail media, including offsite media through baby registry platform and retailer Babylist, said Kait Karadimas, vice president of growth at Nanit.

The appeal isn't simply access to more inventory. Karadimas said the partnership gives Nanit access to “targeted scale” and proprietary data signals it cannot easily replicate through paid social. But expanding that model requires greater transparency from commerce media networks.

“I would love to see them treat it more like a partnership and less like one of the kind of traditional co-ops,” Karadimas said, recalling her experience working for big-box retailers, “where the retailer takes your money and that advertiser just kind of hands it over and you get no visibility.”

Brands want visibility into impressions, clicks, costs, and what retailers charge on top of the underlying media. They also need to understand whether buying through a commerce media network means competing against their own direct media investments.

That information matters beyond campaign reporting. Karadimas said brands want data they can use to improve campaigns, plan future investments, and ultimately defend those investments to the CFO.

Incrementality raises the measurement bar

As commerce media moves further from the point of sale, marketers also need a better answer to a fundamental question: What did this investment add?

“Attribution used to be the bar for success, but now it's incrementality, especially in CPG brands,” Desai said. “We don't want to just keep driving sales from the same consumers. We want to understand: Did my media bring in net new audiences, and did that audience convert?”

Verve recently applied commerce signals to a campaign for a cookie brand that generated $150,000 in incremental sales, according to Desai.

The larger challenge for commerce media is that networks have already demonstrated their usefulness close to the transaction. Earning more budget elsewhere in the media mix requires them to show marketers what they provide that existing channels cannot.

For commerce media networks, expansion alone isn't the value proposition. Proprietary signals, differentiated audiences and inventory, transparent measurement, and evidence of incrementality can give marketers a reason to make room for them.

Watch the full session.