2026商业媒体拐点时刻：全栈制胜之道研究报告

inflection point: How towin with a full-stack approach Commerce media is maturing fast. In a buyer-led market, commerce media networks thatdeliver omnichannel activation, trusted measurement, and embedded AI will stand out. by Jack Trotter, Marc Brodherson, and Quentin Georgewith Aparna Srinath If advertising has a superstar,it’s commerce media networks (CMNs). Over the past few years,CMNs have grown rapidly and will account for over one-fifth of US advertisers’ total budgetsthis year.1Buyers value CMNs for their ability to link ad interactions to purchases. Now the era of easy growth may be over. Retail leaders such as Amazon and Walmart haveestablished CMN businesses that will continue to draw advertisers, but new networks have alsoproliferated, including those from travel, hospitality, and financial-services brands. As a result,less-scaled networks are facing growing competition and increasing pressure to perform,especially as AI reshapes media buying.Agentic commerce adds further complexityas botsbegin completing end-to-end shopping journeys in place of humans. To stay competitive, CMNswill need to evolve into true full-stack partners as advertisers increasingly prioritize integratedend-to-end capabilities. These needs cannot be met at scale by fragmented or single-capabilitynetworks. That’s a core finding from a new McKinsey survey of 150 United States–based advertisingdecision-makers across seven industries.2Building onour earlier CMN research, we find thatadvertisers have raised their expectations: Media buyers no longer want CMNs to operate as asingle performance channel; they want partners that deliver advertising placement opportunitiesacross their customer journey (see sidebar “What is commerce media?”). What is commerce media? Commerce media refers to digital advertisingpowered by first- and third-party data fromtransactions, customer behavior, and loyalty programs to deliver targeted ads to consumers duringmoments of high purchase intent. Retailers, brands, and marketplaces operate commerce medianetworks (CMNs), to sell ad inventory on their own and partner ecosystems both in-store and online.Large providers of CMNs include Amazon, Instacart, Kroger, Target, and Walmart. These retail medianetworks, or RMNs, are the main subset of CMNs. However, many other companies across diversesectors such as travel, finance, and last-mile delivery have entered the market, including Expedia,Marriott, JPMorgan Chase, PayPal, Uber, and United Airlines. CMNs activate first-party data on both on-site and off-site formats. On-site activation includessponsored search and display ads on their websites and in-store kiosks. Off-site activation reachescustomers through partner channels such as the open web, social media, connected TV, and email. Advertisers either buy inventory directly from CMNs or through agencies and third-party buying andorchestration platforms. Consumer interactions with ads placed on CMNs can be directly tied topurchases online, on mobile, or in-store, making them highly measurable. In this article, we explore the trends driving this shift and the rising bar set by advertisers.Then, we outline how leading CMNs are evolving into full-stack partners built around fourdifferentiated capabilities: unique audience reach, end-to-end omnichannel integration,full-funnel measurement, and AI tooling. We also explore how winners are already acting on these trends and positioning themselves totake share in a more competitive ecosystem, offering five practical moves for CMNs to getstarted. The end of easy growth for commerce media Retail media networks (RMNs), the largest subsector of CMNs, are expected to capture morethan $100 billion in US advertiser spending by 2029.3However, based on our analysis,advertiser spending on the broader CMN category is projected to slow—from a 20 percentCAGR over the past three years to a 14 percent CAGR over the next three. This is still outpacingspend on traditional advertising, which our analysis shows will have a –5 percent CAGR over thenext three years, and on digital, which will attain a 9 percent CAGR during the same period.4 Our new survey reflects this shift. About 56 percent of US media buyers plan to increase CMNspending over the next year, up slightly from 55 percent a year ago, but with a lower shareplanning to increase spending by 20 percent or more (Exhibit 1). Most increases will come from reallocations: 22 percent plan to shift budget from digital video,connected TV (CTV, and over the top (OTT to CMNs (up from 14 percent last year. Another 20percent plan to shift from digital display, 18 percent from social, and 15 percent from search.Advertisers are also increasingly shifting their spending among CMNs, with 44 percent havingdone so in the past year. This indicates that CMNs outside of traditional retail—such as finance,travel, and last-mile delivery—are becoming more mature. CMNs still capture the most wallet share in the performance marketing c