On this episode, we examine the challenges and best practices for measuring impact of commerce media advertising. We discuss discuss moving beyond platform-reported metrics, incrementality testing frameworks, clean room strategies, cross-network measurement and building internal capabilities. Arielle Feger, EMARKETER’s Senior Analyst, Media Content hosts Jack Kneuper, Senior Digital Performance Marketing Manager at Perdue Farms and Matt Barresi, President of Digital Commerce and Capabilities at Kimberly-Clark.

On this episode, we explore how leading brands are implementing successful offsite strategies. Focuses include data partnerships and clean rooms, audience targeting off-platform, measuring offsite incrementality, and balancing scale with signal quality. EMARKETER Senior Analyst, Minda Smiley hosts Jason O’Toole, Head of Connected Commerce & Media at Gildan and Ryan Verklin, Paid Media & Retail Media Senior Lead at Bayer.

As commerce media ad spend shifts, clear gaps emerge in buyer maturity and execution. From setup friction to system-level optimization, spend levels signal today’s constraints and what it takes to unlock scalable growth.

This FAQ explains how data clean rooms have become essential infrastructure for retail media, enabling privacy-safe data collaboration, closed-loop measurement, and proof of performance as ad spend grows and marketers demand greater accountability.

Amazon sellers using sponsored product ads now have access to Amazon’s Marketing Cloud clean room. Amazon’s expanded access to its clean room solution will enable SMBs to measure and optimize campaigns with the same sophistication as enterprise advertisers while allowing the ad giant to accelerate its push against larger rivals.

The commerce media space is growing fast, and as it gets more crowded, it’s becoming harder to keep up with the retail media giants. But by teaming up, smaller players can more easily scale their networks to achieve the reach to stay competitive.

Incrementality has always been the holy grail of retail media. But lately, it’s taken on greater importance as ad budgets are squeezed and retail media networks (RMNs) fight for their share of ad dollars.

The advertising industry craves standardization in a fragmented landscape shaped by rising privacy expectations and demands for actionable insights. To move beyond aggregate campaign analytics, businesses need user-level insights without adding legal, technical, or governance hurdles.

The free, ad-supported internet runs on consumer data. But privacy legislation is making it harder for advertisers to take advantage of it.

To keep pace in a complex landscape and meet increasing demands from advertisers, commerce media players need to invest in fresh channels, tools, and innovation.

Nearly two-thirds (66%) of US data and ad professionals have adopted data clean rooms as a result of privacy legislation and/or signal loss, according to February 2024 data from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and BWG Strategy. Since data is at the core of retail media success, enabling brands to target and measure campaigns more accurately, it’s not surprising that data clean rooms have come into play.

The identity landscape is vast and growing more complex. Google confirmed it will phase out third-party cookies but continues to delay deprecation. A wave of privacy regulations in the US challenges advertisers operating across state lines. Plus, an increasingly digital world has made it difficult to track users across TV, social media, and the open web.

Retail media networks (RMNs) have a lot of data and a healthy amount of inventory. But selling on-site inventory to advertisers can be complicated. Connecting retail media data with off-site ads on places like social networks and connected TV (CTV) is even more complicated. RMNs can’t do everything related to selling and serving ads on their own, especially if they want to capitalize on off-site placements.

Generative AI will “supercharge our creativity,” said VML chief innovation officer Brian Yamada. He believes the tech will improve marketers’ ability to tell stories, but it will also raise new privacy concerns.