By Conner Sherline, Founder and CEO of Disco
Retail media’s first phase of growth was powered by a simple formula: monetize owned digital real estate and charge a premium for proximity to purchase.
It worked because the opportunity was obvious. Retailers were sitting on underused inventory, brands wanted measurable performance, and the category offered clarity. If an ad appeared close to a transaction and drove sales, the value proposition was easy to understand.
For many retail media networks, that model is no longer enough. The most mature networks have already commercialized their most valuable endemic placements. Sponsored listings, search results, category pages, and add-to-cart placements remain foundational, but they are finite. There are only so many surfaces a retailer can load with monetization before performance softens, the shopper experience deteriorates, or both.
That is why the industry increasingly finds itself at a different stage of development. Retail media is moving into an optimization phase. The question now is how to expand revenue without weakening the very conditions that made the category so attractive in the first place.
Simply creating more inventory will not solve that problem. The industry’s first answer to this ceiling was offsite activation. If on-site endemic inventory is constrained, the thinking goes, first-party data can be extended into other channels like social platforms, open-web retargeting, and broader performance media environments.
Offsite media can play an important role in a broader offering, but it also comes with tradeoffs. The economics are often less attractive than they initially appear. Much of the value is captured by the platforms that own the auction, the infrastructure, and the consumer relationship. Just as important, offsite activation is rarely a durable source of differentiation. Nearly every network can extend audiences outward. That may add revenue, but it does not necessarily strengthen the distinctiveness of the media business itself.
The Market’s Waiting Solution
For years, retail media has been discussed as if its most valuable moments begin and end with traditional shopping environments: search results, product pages, category browsing, digital shelves. But some of the highest-attention moments in the customer journey happen elsewhere, especially after a transaction has already taken place.
Order confirmations. Tracking pages. Delivery updates. Account dashboards. App sessions. Email touchpoints tied to an active purchase. These are owned environments where consumer attention is unusually focused and trust is unusually high. The shopper has already transacted. They are engaged. They are looking for information. And in many cases, they are spending meaningful time in environments the retailer or platform controls completely.
For a surprising number of media networks, those moments remain underdeveloped from a monetization standpoint.
The next phase of growth in commerce media is unlikely to come from forcing more ads into already crowded placements. It is more likely to come from better use of owned, high-intent moments across the broader customer journey, particularly moments that are additive to existing endemic businesses rather than cannibalistic of them.
Traditional retail media has been fueled primarily by endemic advertisers: brands already sold on the retailer’s shelves. That made sense in the early years because those budgets were the easiest to activate. But every network eventually reaches a limit when it relies too heavily on the same pool of buyers. Long-term growth requires opening the door to adjacent categories and non-endemic demand in a way that still feels contextually appropriate to the consumer experience.
One of retail media’s greatest strengths has been the perception that it sits closer to utility than many legacy forms of digital advertising. It can feel more actionable, more measurable, and less interruptive. But that advantage is not guaranteed to last. If the category starts repeating the excesses of earlier digital ad models by overloading experiences, obscuring value, or treating every consumer interaction as one more impression to extract, it risks undermining its own credibility.
The Implementation Question
The networks that stand out over the next several years will succeed by matching monetization to moments where attention, intent, and consumer receptivity are genuinely aligned. That requires the ability to manage demand quality, strong creative standards and clear controls over what runs where. It also requires commercial models that preserve real control for the network itself, rather than outsourcing the most important parts of the business to third parties and calling it innovation.
Durable media businesses own the customer relationship, shape the advertiser relationship, and maintain control over the environments where monetization happens. In that sense, the future of commerce media is about ownership of surfaces and their attention-rich moments, and ownership of the commercial infrastructure that turns those moments into high-quality media opportunities.
That is also why the category should be careful not to define itself too narrowly. Commerce media is already expanding beyond the legacy boundaries of retail media. As more high-intent consumer interactions move across apps, service platforms, transaction flows, and other digital touchpoints, the most valuable media opportunities will increasingly be defined by who owns the moment in which intent appears.
