Commerce Media Activations: From Strategy to Success | Behind the Numbers: Special Edition
32:45 Share

Welcome to a special edition episode of the eMarketer podcast, Behind the Numbers. I'm Marcus, and today we have a special episode from the eMarketer Summit, Commerce Media Trends 2025 from May 9th. You'll be listening to a panel discussion exploring how leading brands are implementing successful commerce media strategies with a focus on network selection, integration with existing channels, and optimization techniques for maximum impact.

A marketer, principal analyst, Sarah Marzano hosts Mark Sestaro, Senior Vice President of Sales in North America for InfoSum and Niccolo Glazo, Senior Director, Media and Omni channel of Kettle and Fire. Here it is.

Hi everyone. For those of you who are just joining us now, welcome. I'm Sarah Marzano. I'm a Principal Analyst here at eMarketer. And for those of you who are coming from our keynote and fireside chat, thanks for sticking around. I'm really excited to continue with our programming with our first panel of the day, which has been made possible by InfoSum. We're going to be focusing on retail and commerce media activations and taking a look toward navigating the next phase.

Before we begin, a quick programming note. Kineso's Elizabeth Neubauer Donovan unfortunately had unforeseen circumstances that will make her unable to join us today. We're going to certainly miss her perspective, but we have a fantastic group with us, and I know that we're in for a great discussion.

So to kick things off, I can't resist sharing a few key data points that I think will help set the foundation for our conversation. In 2025, we are forecasting that commerce media ad spending will reach nearly $70 billion with a growth rate of 19%. And that growth rate is set to accelerate in 2026.

While retail media remains the dominant force, we're seeing new players from travel, finance, and beyond enter the space, driving cross-vertical activations, partnerships, and really exciting new approaches for data-driven marketing.

So please join me in welcoming our panelists. We have Mark Sestero, who's the SVP of Sales for North America at InfoSum, and Nicolo Gloazzo, Senior Director of Media and Omnichannel at Kettle & Fire. Before we get started, I'd love to invite each of you to just do a brief introduction. Tell us a little bit about your company and your role in the commerce media space. Mark, let's start with you.

Sure. Thank you, Sarah. Excited to be here. Mark Sestero, I lead our North America commercial business at InfoSum, which is the world's leading data collaboration platform. You know, there's a lot of talk and a lot of growth around commerce and retail media specifically in the business of collaboration and helping companies connect and generate different types of insights with one another. We really are kind of finding ourselves to be at the front edge of that. So excited for today's discussion.

and I guess I'll kick it back to you. Very exciting. Okay, Nicolo, what about you? Yeah, thanks for having me, first of all. So I'm Nico. I've been actually with Catalan Fire now six years.

and I lead media and omni-channel. So I oversee DTC, Amazon and retail media. Retail media has been my focus for the past, let's say two, three years because the company is expanding mostly retail and that's where the growth, majority of the growth is coming from. Catalan Fire itself is a bone broth company launched kind of a long time ago, I'd say in Austin by two brothers. And we make the best bone broth, I think in America right now.

Amazing. Austin, Texas is my hometown, so I have a soft spot for any company born there. But I'm so excited to have you both. I think you bring such a sort of fascinating perspective into where the industry is today, and we should be able to have a really great conversation. So Mark, I want to start with you. Data collaboration technology, things like data clean rooms, feel like they've really sort of gone from niche to necessity in commerce media.

I'm curious how you've seen the use cases evolve over time as this technology really moves from the margins into center stage. So what are you seeing there?

Yeah, I think that's a great call out. It's kind of interesting from our perspective of InfoSum, we've been in markets since we started in 2016. So we've been at it for a while. And one of the first types of business that we worked on was retail media networks. So we have seen this for a while. We've been in it for a while. The emergence and kind of the discussion points around it have continuously changed. And obviously they're more prominent now than ever before.

But really, what we're seeing is that it's more accessible. In a company like ourselves that's focused on interoperability and helping companies connect with privacy at the forefront of that, but in a seamless and scalable manner, this business throughout commerce is really just taking off. And I think a lot of that's not necessarily because of

not always because of new capabilities, it's about more awareness, right? Being able to deliver kind of leads to more trends, more knowledge, and that has scaled and scaled and scaled, just like the beginning stages of connected television or advanced TV in general. So I think it's a lot more about not always just technology. Again, we've been at it for a while. Certainly we've had our advancements, but it's the delivery, the effectiveness,

of collaboration across commerce, especially as it pertains to, you know, my remit within data collaboration and clean rooms. And we've just seen that grow to new customers, new advertisers, new businesses, new retailers, and then adoption, like from the ground up of the folks working at those organizations, what they're familiar with, how they're learning, to come in with a case study, to come in with knowledge, where...

you're the first one to go, I think has been really one of the biggest booms of that. So yes, certainly there's technology that has advanced. I don't want to downplay that. But one of the first things, like I said, we did was retail media. So I generally think there's also a lot of credit to the people and the knowledge of what they're trying to achieve now. Yeah, no, absolutely. I think you did a great job sort of distilling the momentum that has kind of been brewing in this space. Like I think for me as an analyst covering retail,

retail and commerce media, it's been fascinating to see how the utility of transaction data has really caught on in the world of advertising. And it feels like we're sort of just at the beginning of kind of scratching the surface on all the ways that can be scaled, which again is bringing things like data collaboration really front and center.

Something we've talked about a bit today in the sessions we've had so far is the fact that the success of retail and commerce media over the past five years or so has given way to a surge of new entrants. And that's created what can feel like an extremely crowded and even chaotic landscape.

Niccolo, I'm curious, as a brand that began in D2C and then later expanded distribution into retail, it occurs to me that Kettle & Fire has had to quickly get up to speed in terms of navigating this crowded retail media ecosystem. So I'm curious how you today approach channel prioritization and budget allocation and how that system maybe has changed or evolved over time as you learn.

Yeah, for sure. So definitely like Kevin and fire have an advantage, I'd say because as starting DTC first, a lot of the people within the team are like performance oriented. So it's kind of much easier when you are like performance oriented and specifically like digital native.

to start looking into the retail media ecosystem and trying to understand how it's working, what type of tactic you can implement, how to test and validate idea, et cetera. So that's definitely like an important piece. From a channel standpoint, I definitely recommend usually to start always at the bottom of the funnel first and then expand upper funnel, unless you have a limited budget, of course. Retail media,

However, also cover, in my opinion, it's pretty sick because it covers like both bottom and you can also leverage for supporting like top of the funnel advertisement. Of course, bottom of the funnel, simple sponsor product advertisement, the easiest one to launch and the one that are going to move as many units as possible because when you are at retail, your goal is going to be

always to drive velocity. So what you want to do is like, okay, make sure to invest your dollars to tactics that actually support this goal. But at the same time, you want to keep feeding the top of the funnel, the pool of people that become aware of your brand and are not aware of your brand just yet.

So leveraging retail media in that sense, their first party audience through other third party platform like DSP provider to kind of leverage those audience to make them aware of your product via their first party audience and then convert them to customer, I think is like the right tactic for like a mid-sized brand or large enterprise, I'd say.

From a budget and meanwhile prioritization standpoint, I like to look at percentage of revenue. The easiest one that I like to look at is percentage of revenue, specifically for a given retailer. So I like to say, okay, for a given retailer, if the forecasted revenue is X, I'm going to estimate it. I'm going to invest X.

Y amount of dollars into retail media. That's very back of the napkin map, I know for that, but it's more than enough at the beginning just to get a sense, especially if a brand is kind of small, to get a sense of, hey, this is how much, pretty much I need to invest on retail media to support that given retailer. Then some retailer, they also have like a digital penetration goal that you need to hit. So that's an important metric you need to take into consideration when budgeting and forecasting your sales.

the dollar that you want to invest for that retailer. And then a third component is going to be future opportunities. So sometimes you might want to, you know, certain retailers might have like a different like footprint compared with others. So the opportunities there are much, much higher.

And so you want to make sure that you give enough love and enough support to that retailer that is going to help future scale because the opportunities are just so much more than other smaller retailers. Smaller retailers are great, especially if you're starting out, in my opinion. But then as you start to expand into those bigger mass channels, it becomes important to kind of weigh the investment accordingly with the future opportunity.

That's so helpful. And I think for anyone who's watching this who doesn't follow Niccolo on LinkedIn, I would highly recommend it because I think you're so generous with sharing the best practices that you've picked up. And what I love about the frameworks that you sort of just shared with us today is they feel really actionable and they also feel like they have wide applications for any of the brand marketers who are listening today who are feeling just really overwhelmed about how to get organized and sort of where to focus when there are seemingly so many

places to focus. Mark, I think we've talked a bit about sort of like all the ways, all the opportunities data clean rooms can position themselves to unlock sort of doing more in retail media. I'm curious whether you see data collaboration as a potential solution or salve for fragmentation. Can you share any ways that you're helping brands or networks drive efficiency in the face of all of this chaos and busyness?

Absolutely. Yeah, I think that is one of the biggest solves in this space that data collaboration platforms or clean rooms enable. And the reality is there are so many different options. There's so many different ways to learn. There's businesses that are starting from the ground up. There's businesses that have been in market for a long time. But there's also retailers in the same position, some more advanced than others.

So being able to connect and kind of sort through that fragmentation is where clean rooms should thrive. Being able to do that at scale with ease and speed, which is one of the things that we're really proud of at InfoSum, but all of that data, all of that opportunity is only as valuable as

being able to leverage it. It can't take 12 months to generate insights because you're too late. You already missed. So how quickly can you move? How quickly can you scale? How quickly can you build those networks? Whether they're just general data networks or something we're very active in, which is a private data network, which is where a brand works with their specific partners and only those partners to cultivate whatever that

those thresholds, those goals, those KPIs are, and then to do that essentially in the turn of a click. How can you do that in a day or two or three and run that out across the org? So I think fragmentation from my lens has actually been one of the biggest paths to championing clean rooms because we're able to work effectively and agnostically across all the sources. And when you're on the advertiser side, I think

You owe it to yourselves if you're able to, to investigate all those different sources. There's a lot of experience out there, but there's also preconceived notions of what is valuable and what is not. And a good clean room, a good solution should allow you to actually and actively gain those insights rather than, you know, actioning on data downstream and then looking at it afterwards to see if it works.

I think you kind of missed the whole boat if that's your approach. I think there's so much more to learn upstream and to understand and to work with all of these partners. And yes, all of them may not be the perfect fit, but that is what the point of that collaboration should be. And that's kind of how we feel we plug into that fragmentation really well. And that spans just media and other parts too. Yeah, that's great. And I think you tapped into a notion that

I'm sure all of us and everyone in our audience can really relate to, which is that when you're in this space that's really heavy on analytics and data, more data is a very exciting thing, but you need to be able to contextualize it quite quickly and be able to make decisions without waiting for a long time before understanding it. So I'm glad that you sort of touched on that necessity of not only being able to analyze all the different data sets, being able to do that

that quickly so we can make decisions based on where the consumer is right now.

So switching gears a little bit, I think for me, one of the most exciting parts about covering commerce media today is how quickly new formats and technologies are emerging. So everything from CTV and what a big role that plays in retail and commerce media, even directly shoppable integrations within shoppable TV, which is fun to watch, to things like digital signage in stores or smart carts that are able to sort of pick up on in-stock levels and sort of

proximity. So Mark, my next question is going to be for you as well. I'm curious to hear how those emerging formats are changing the role of data collaboration. I think at a surface level, it sort of feels like this is only another sort of tailwind, sort of increasing the relevance and utility of the surface that you offer. But I'm curious whether that's something that you're hearing from retail media networks who are excited about testing into new formats.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, from our lens, we obviously don't necessarily control the types of new, you know, whether there's

We help enable the ability to evaluate those sources. Everyone has their right to create their own products or product lines, and certainly those can be driven through Cleanrooms. But from our end, yes, that's very... It kind of goes back to exactly what I was just talking about earlier, the scalability of it. How do you productize that? How do you form stronger relationships? How do you customize offerings? How do you generate insights that weren't previously available or too difficult or too slow to enable?

So I think those formats, those changes are definitely a huge part of this industry. And again, I don't mean to sound like a broken record, but scalability and repeatability are incredibly important. So if you can only create one of those formats and run it out every 8, 12 months, 6 months, that's just too slow.

And then on the advertiser side, how do you evaluate maybe the same format across 12 different partners at once? So the ability to connect, connect with privacy and connect quickly. And, you know, you just mentioned that before as well with there's a lot of kind of data that goes behind this. But a technology that's simple to use and easy to understand and generate insights from allows you to learn more about those formats and be at the forefront.

I think the inverse of that is true. So it's not just for the advertiser, it's for those offering those new services. If they can do that at scale and with speed, then they've been more successful as well. And that's something that we see a ton of, I think. And I know we'll come talk about this in a little bit, but there's a level of proactivity. It's not saying you shouldn't go to every advertiser and say, well, what do you want to see?

or we can do anything you want, I think you have to take that step to kind of offer and make some unique insights and kind of put yourself in their shoes. And that in terms of, I'll kind of loop this on to new formats, but that is something that we're really proud to enable and we see a lot of success on is leaning forward, not being reactive, saying we can do anything.

Makes a ton of sense. And you mentioned not wanting to be a broken record, but I think in this industry there are certainly some things that bear repeating, right? It's quite top of mind that a lot of networks are looking for smart ways to scale, but wanting to be able to bring those same performance outcomes that have made them so successful on their owned and operated channels

advertisers, right? And we know that advertisers struggle to compare campaign results across really disparate networks and retailers who might measure things differently, right? These are concerns that are quite top of mind. So fully forgive you for sort of coming back to those main challenges. Something this brings up to me, Nicolo, is that with so many new formats, and you mentioned smaller retailers and larger retailers when you were speaking earlier, it occurs to me that the

Playing field isn't always even, right? Some retailers have access to

deeper budgets and more expansive store footprints compared to others. So I'm curious to hear how you're evaluating those really disparate opportunities as a brand and whether anything's worked in terms of layering in the different capabilities of the many partners that you're working with, right? We know that consumers encounter many digital touchpoints and in-person touchpoints on their path to purchase. So what have you learned from this sort of disparate landscape?

Yeah, so definitely like the ecosystem is evolving a lot. So what I'm noticing is like, and what I've been testing in the past is like,

Even if a retailer is pretty small, but they are like, it's the perfect opportunity sometimes to test new format and new placement. Depends on the budget, of course, but it's the perfect environment because there's probably less red tape than a larger retailer that might have more doors. So if you can test something like a new placement with a smaller retailer and then evaluate performance, I think it's a great starting point. However, like I was saying,

always comes down to budget because sometimes some retailers they might require a heavy investment compared with whatever is like their read like their forecasted revenue for for that branding that given retailer which might gonna change in the future but at the beginning as a brand is starting out like that's a really important assessment because

if a retailer is not at that level just yet and it might ask you to invest like 100k to a shopper tactic or like to an in-store digital signage, some brands might want to pull back in that sense and just leverage platforms like Instagram, GoPath and DoorDash. But however, at the same time, I'm

very flexible with my budget. So what I like is to be fluid with the budget and where I see opportunity being able to shift budget around among different retailer or different like placement. And that's why sometimes shopper tactic require like, you know, three, six months in advance, like sign off, IO, etc. That lock brand in for like a little bit. Yeah, for a long time. Meanwhile, if you level leverage, like retail media platform, it's like very easy to kind of

turn on and off your advertisement effort. Digital signage and those types of placement, I think are very interesting. And what I did in the past is always like to try to do as many A/B tests as possible. So for example, if you want to try digital, like digital signage at Whole Foods, you might want to run that test for like 50 stores, and then you're going to assess the performance versus the other like stores.

So that way you're going to be able to somehow understand if that's an incremental revenue driver or not for your business, even though it's not only about incrementality, it comes down also to kind of impression and making sure that your potential customer are going to see you multiple times

along their journey. So that's multiple consideration that you as a brand need to make in order to evaluate those type of shopper tactics or new placement that come in place that retailer kind of show and put out there recently.

Yeah, I love that you've highlighted the importance and benefit of being able to be very flexible and nimble into terms of like how you're planning and where you're investing. And also how you have this appetite for testing into things seemingly pretty quickly, right? Like, let's test this out. Let's see how it's going. Let's get results that tell us sort of directionally whether the juice is worth the squeeze in order to take advantage of those moments as they arise, right? I feel like that's a

theme that's sort of emerging here in this conversation is being able to take the information that's available and make a decision quite quickly. And I think anyone who's been reading the news over the past few weeks sort of knows how quickly things can change from a consumer sentiment and economy standpoint. So it feels like this is a real sort of strength of this area.

i don't think we're allowed to have a conversation about commerce media without touching on the topic of measurement um i'll plug that later in our programming my colleague sky canavis is going to have an entire panel discussion i'm dedicated to the topic um but it's so top of mind that i want to um field a few questions to you all on the topic as well um so

Measurement is something that is certainly evolving, but I think a lot of folks in the space maybe feel like it's not evolving quickly enough. So Niccolo, from a brand's perspective, I'm curious to hear from you whether there are pitfalls that advertisers should be wary of around focusing on maybe the wrong KPIs or flawed KPIs. Which KPIs are you using sort of the most?

Is there an element of change management, right? If you're encouraging your organization to take a more expansive look into measurement and evaluating success. I recognize that was like six questions in one. So you sort of take that in the direction you want to. Yeah, okay. Definitely there's a lot of noise in the market right now when it comes to measurement, I feel like.

Overall, it's important to understand your current stage as a business, I'd say, but

One KPI that I like to look at, even if it's very overrated and at the same time, so I don't like to look at that one, but I look into like the ROS to compare like, you know, super like top line revenue, high level, like across multiple platforms. It's not the best, but it's the easy way to compare performance among different platforms. However, ROS is like not my favorite one because a lot of retail media platform now

Right now, they also take into consideration in-store sales within the attributed sales. Some have like 14 days attribution, some have like 30 days attribution.

So ROS is really is not the best way, in my opinion, to measure performance. But then you can drill down into digital penetration. So understanding like correlation between like ROS or not ROS, but your investment and digital penetration. So are you as you increase your spend level within like retail media, are you actually increasing your digital penetration? Yes or no. And then you're new to brand customer. Are you actually bringing a new customer to the business or not?

So if some of those questions, the answers to some of those questions kind of know, then it means that could be potentially the wrong channel or you want to relocate the budget more top of the funnel or simply just pocket those dollars and invest elsewhere, like in influencer marketing or streaming TV, etc.

But smaller brand might be, you know, could be a little bit more difficult to invest in streaming TV or like some other other channels. But at more mature brand, I feel like running also incrementality test and leverage like third party solution that help you to kind of understand the impact that your streaming TV or like the whole the final advertisement paid social. So basically everything together, your marketing mix model, the impact that your marketing mix model has on your business overall, I think it becomes very, very important.

And that's something that I'm trying to do more and more right now, which is not just like incrementality testing, but leveraging third party tools that allow me to understand how my marketing mix is going to influence like revenue at Walmart or Kroger or other retailers. So because right now, as you start to scale and invest more and more dollars into your media mix, you're going to get more and more like, you know, muddy, let's say the overall ecosystem and the KPI.

So it's going to be really hard to tell the story to leadership as well, where you should invest your dollars and how many, you know, incremental dollars you need from a marketing standpoint to support the top line revenue goal that you have. So that's why it's important to leverage those third party tools to kind of build a better story for the leadership team. Yeah, no, that makes complete sense. And I think you've sort of set up perfectly this sort of generalized consensus that ROAS can be quite a blunt instrument, right? It's a necessary tool, but it can't be

a set it and forget it scenario, particularly when you as an advertiser are tasked with making the case for incremental budget, right? And needing to sort of prove out the value of that budget, where it's going to be spent and why it's going to be spent that way. And there's so many nuances to take into account. So I'm glad you brought up the value of sort of third party agnostic players in sort of aiding both retailers and advertisers to that effect.

Mark, for you, when it comes to measuring the effectiveness of commerce media campaigns, I think there's tension that can sort of occur between the need for really granular insights and balancing that with the privacy limitations of data sharing. So I know that's sort of like the bread and butter of what InfoSum is doing, but I wonder if you can expand a little bit on that balance between those two sort of levels of view into data.

Yeah, absolutely. I think you're spot on. So there is definitely a balance between the privacy element and then just the nuanced specifics of it. And that's the balance that we've been developing and kind of tweaking ever since I've been here for the last almost five years now. And really that's also a byproduct of the market and different data sets available. So from our position,

We have to be agnostic. We have to be able to support those that have their ambitions of being as granular as possible. We have to be able to support those in maybe certain categories or industries that have more privacy regulations than the average.

Our core product ensures privacy across any type of measurement. So we're always confident in what role we play and how we help bridge that gap. So maybe a little bit of a middle answer there, but generally that's something that the parties have to kind of align on. We feel very comfortable that we're able to and confident and we've seen a lot of success

in being able to help companies take a jump forward to be more advanced than what they've done in the past because of the way that we approach data, because of the way that we're protecting the consumer from every step from beginning to end. And we've helped many organizations that said they would never get to someplace get there. So that's definitely a really big part of it as well.

And then just for me, just to kind of go back to what Nicola was saying, because I think it's really interesting. I think there's such an element of measurement where whether it's ROAS or whatever your KPIs are that you're measuring on that are always so important. But where I see success and I wish maybe there was more and I'm going to say this more generally, but it's also really nice when companies take a totally different approach. I think a lot of

A lot of organizations get bogged down in trying to chase what they've always done and make it work together rather than looking at it a little bit separately and saying, what if we go this approach rather than like, I tweak this little thing, I tweak this little thing and I keep them harmonious the whole time. You can appreciate that's not always the easiest thing to do. It's a bold step. But to me, that's one of the exciting things that I've seen more companies start to adopt is just a total shift.

because I think there's a lot of room for improvement there. So I'm just kind of coming back to that because it was a really interesting point and something that I'm excited about and passionate about.

Yeah, and that tees me up well. We're running short on time here, but I have some closing questions for both of you. And I think, Mark, you've just teed yourself up well for the question. I'm going to put you in the hot seat on a little bit here. You work with a lot of retailers and commerce media networks. I'm curious for anyone in our audience who's listening,

To hear about your perspective on which companies are sort of best positioned to succeed in this space. Like what are the building blocks? What is the organizational sort of mindset or anything else that you've noticed that really are the hallmarks of a company that's ready to succeed in this space?

Yeah, I think that's a great question. And maybe this is a surprising answer. Maybe it's not. But it's not about who has the best data, the most data, or even the least amount of data. All of those are fit to be the right partners and the most forward thinking. For me, it's, and for us really across all of our, again, we've been at this for a long time, so we have a pretty good pulse on it. It's the one's most lean forward. The one's not waiting and asking what someone else wants. How do you take

that leap, how do you showcase that your products, your features, your improvements are worth it? And you're bringing something to someone else rather than saying, well, what do you want? So I think it's just the forward leaning from commerce media to just publishers, to advertisers, the ones willing to try and push and move.

And do that before something's perfect. I think in the environment of clean rooms, they allow so many more protections that you don't have to get everything just right. You can keep evolving as you go and not wait. Again, I stress the same thing, but you don't have to wait 12 months. You should be able to do this in a day or an hour.

So to me, the most important part there and the best way to answer that is the most successful, the most exciting are the ones that are always moving and pushing the envelope. And that could be different products, but it's really just leaning in and encouraging others and kind of thinking, getting them to think different rather than being reactive. So proactive versus reactive is probably the best way to shorten that and boil that down.

Yeah, no, I was also thinking about the phrase, not letting perfect be the enemy of the good. Yeah, that is a motto for sure. So yeah, that's a great way to say it. Awesome. I love that perspective. And Niccolo, I'm curious, like, again, I feel like you bring such a sort of great perspective and so much generosity in terms of your learnings as an advertiser navigating this space.

Is there any closing thought, any kind of piece of advice that you would have for anyone in our audience who's listening from the brand marketer side who might be feeling overwhelmed with how to navigate this space and get really organized in their approach?

- Yeah, so probably definitely like having like a 20, 80/20 approach I would say, right? Like, so always focusing on those like opportunities or retailers that, you know, have the highest probability of succeeding in the future or like, you know, from a, even from a forecast of like opportunity or footprint or like, you know, door expansion, focus on those retailers that have like the highest opportunity to become one of your top three, top five retailer, I would say.

and start step by step knocking out one after the other. I don't have anything else from a recommendation standpoint because it's such an evolving space, which is easy to kind of get like,

crazy about it. So always, in my opinion, focus on the top three, top five, and then keep testing and iterating. Yeah, no, I think there's a ton of utility in that advice and also in acknowledging that the space is changing so quickly that, again, we can't have set it and forget it strategies. We have to stay really nimble. Listen, that flew by for me. Thank you both so much for joining me. Thank you, Niclo. Thank you, Mark. Thank you.