.jpg)
Retailers have known for over a century that they hold something brands want. Macy's and Sears proved it. By the early 20th century, manufacturers paid for prime floor placement, end-cap displays, and catalog position because retailers controlled access to buyers that brands couldn't reach any other way. The transaction relationship functioned as a media asset long before digital gave it a name.
Loyalty programs turned that informal arrangement into structured data. Frequent flyer programs, hotel points schemes, and grocery cards all did a version of the same thing: attach an identifier to a customer, track what they bought, and find a buyer for that profile. Airlines discovered their purchase histories were worth money to hotel groups and financial services companies. Grocery chains discovered CPG brands would pay for visibility into actual basket behavior, not just demographic estimates. The data asset had been there for years. Activating it against a live audience in real time presented a different problem.
Amazon crossed that line. Its sponsored product listings, launched in 2012, took the logic of the department store end-cap and wired it to real-time targeting and closed-loop measurement. A brand could prove return on ad spend against verified purchases. Retail media emerged as a distinct category.
Other businesses recognized the same structural advantage. Banks, airlines, and ticketing platforms all maintained verified transaction histories at scale. If Amazon could monetize access to active shoppers, so could they. The category began to broaden. Commerce media has emerged as a term for the wider model: advertising powered by first-party transaction data, regardless of which industry generates it.
Retail media is a vertical application of this broader model. Commerce media is the horizontal layer that extends transaction-driven advertising beyond retail environments. Where the two overlap and where they diverge changes what you build, what you buy, and what your measurement actually proves.
There is no single industry-standard definition of where retail media ends and commerce media begins. What follows is a working framework grounded in how the two models can differ in practice for advertisers and operators.
What retail media is
Retail media generally refers to advertising sold by retailers, running on retailer-owned inventory, and powered by the retailer's first-party shopping data. Amazon Advertising, Walmart Connect, Target Roundel, and Kroger Precision Marketing are the canonical examples. The retailer owns the website, the app, and the transaction history of every customer who shops there. It monetizes that by selling ad placements to brands seeking to reach those customers.
The inventory typically sits where the shopping happens: sponsored product listings in search results, banner placements on category pages, display units embedded in the checkout flow. Some retail media networks have expanded into off-site placements, buying programmatic media and activating it with retailer data. The underlying logic stays the same. The retailer's purchase data is the targeting asset, and the retailer's platform is what creates the ad opportunity.
A grocery chain running retail media knows a customer bought pasta last Tuesday, holds a loyalty tier that signals weekly shopping frequency, and is currently searching for olive oil. That signal quality is one reason retail media often outperforms standard display. The targeting reflects what someone has actually bought, not what demographic bucket a third-party model assigned them to.
Retail media will account for nearly a quarter of all US digital ad investment by 2028, per eMarketer. Amazon’s advertising business has surpassed a $50 billion annual run rate. The model is well established. The practical prerequisite is scale: Walgreens reaches roughly 100 million-plus loyalty members, according to public reporting; Kroger has purchase history on 60 million-plus households. One of the primary barriers to entry for a standalone Retail Media Network (RMN) is audience density. Without sufficient Monthly Active Users (MAUs), the data lacks the statistical significance required to build high-indexing audience segments for programmatic activation.
What commerce media is
Commerce media can be understood as the expansion of transaction data beyond the retail shelf. It allows any high-frequency transactional business, from Fintech to Travel, to monetize their 'Bottom of Funnel' (BoF) signals. The underlying mechanic is consistent: first-party transaction data powers the advertising model. How broadly commerce media is defined varies across the industry. Some frameworks include off-site programmatic, connected TV, and social extensions of first-party data. In this framework, the transaction data signal is the defining feature of the category regardless of channel.
A bank sees every dollar its customers spend across every category and every retailer. Chase can determine whether a cardholder shops at luxury stores, travels internationally several times a year, or consistently spends at home improvement retailers. That spending history spans the full consumer economy. Chase Media Solutions launched in 2024 to monetize that data, reaching 80 million customers without being tied to any single retail context.
A food delivery platform knows order frequency, cuisine preferences, average spend per order, and neighborhood. Instacart advertising-and-other revenue reached an annual run rate above $1 billion in 2025. Uber runs a comparable network across its rideshare and delivery businesses.
A defining characteristic of commerce media is that the operator does not need to be a retailer. In most cases, it involves processing purchases and owning the customer relationship. This allows the model to extend to financial services, travel, ticketing, telecommunications, subscription businesses, and any other sector with large transaction volumes and direct customer data.
Commerce media can extend beyond the constraint of on-site inventory. Retail media primarily runs ads where people shop. Commerce media can run ads across the full customer journey, with some models (like post-transaction environments) capturing intent at its peak. A common thread across many of these operators is the transaction relationship itself. Businesses that process purchases at scale and own direct customer touchpoints hold a data asset that can power advertising. The prerequisite is less about a product catalog and more about access to verified purchase history.
How they differ in practice
These distinctions are directional. In practice, many platforms span both models, and the boundaries continue to evolve as retail media networks expand off-site and commerce media operators build more on-platform inventory.
Who can operate them
Retail media requires a retailer with a shopping destination, a transaction history, and audience scale at volume. Commerce media can extend to businesses that process purchases at scale, including banks, travel platforms, subscription services, and ticketing companies. That is a significantly larger pool of potential operators, which is why commerce media is expanding rapidly despite retail media's larger current revenue base.
Where the inventory lives
Retail media inventory sits primarily on retailer-owned properties: the website, the app, in-store digital screens. Commerce media inventory includes transaction placements that retail media networks typically do not reach across the broader ecosystem: the order summary pages, payment pages, confirmation screens, and post-purchase receipt emails of airlines, banks, food delivery platforms, and ticketing companies.
What the targeting signal covers
Retail media uses purchase and browsing signals within one retailer's ecosystem. A sporting goods retailer knows a customer bought running shoes there. Commerce media, when run across a network of operators, can combine signals from multiple transaction contexts without any Personally Identifiable Information (PII) transferring between operators. A customer who bought running shoes, registered for a road race, and subscribed to a nutrition app presents a richer profile than any single operator's data could generate independently.
How attribution closes
Retail media closes the loop within the retailer's environment. A customer who clicks a sponsored listing and completes the purchase in the same session generates clean, direct attribution. Commerce media can measure across a broader transaction ecosystem, confirming whether a customer who saw an ad at one transaction point made a subsequent qualifying purchase. Commerce media's attribution approach can use verified transaction data on both sides of the measurement: actual purchase events rather than probabilistic modeling.
SKU-level vs. ecosystem attribution
While retail media traditionally offers SKU-level attribution (confirming the purchase of a specific box of detergent), commerce media can enable ecosystem-level attribution. This allows brands to measure the total lifetime value (LTV) of a customer acquired during or immediately after the transaction, such as a new credit card sign-up or a long-term subscription, rather than just the immediate return on ad spend (ROAS) of a single product.
What it costs to start
Building a retail media network requires substantial infrastructure: ad-serving technology, data clean room capabilities, demand-side relationships, and measurement tooling. Walmart, Target, and Amazon have each invested hundreds of millions building their platforms. Entry into commerce media can, in some cases, start with a post-transaction placement product that runs on an existing confirmation page, with no owned ad infrastructure required.
What advertisers should know
For a brand deciding where to allocate spend, the question is where in the purchase cycle the ad needs to run, not which category label applies to the operator.
Retail media is primarily designed to capture existing demand. A customer searching for wireless headphones on Amazon or Walmart is actively in market. Sponsored listings in that search reach them at maximum buying intent within a specific retail context. The attribution is direct and the proximity to conversion is tight.
Post-transaction commerce media can capture cross-sell and discovery intent. Someone who just booked a flight is in active planning mode, receptive to hotel offers, travel insurance, or car rental. Someone who just completed a grocery order is a plausible target for adjacent subscription services. The completed purchase confirms willingness to transact; the ad reaches them when that intent is freshest.
Commerce media is emerging as a key engine for non-endemic advertising. While a grocery RMN excels at 'endemic' sales (e.g., selling pasta to someone looking at pasta), commerce media captures 'adjacent intent', reaching a traveler with a premium credit card offer at the moment of peak financial commitment. A hotel chain advertising inside a grocery app is a contextual mismatch. The same hotel chain advertising to someone who has just purchased a flight confirmation is well-timed. Post-transaction placements often outperform pre-purchase display formats, particularly when targeting runs on confirmed transaction signals rather than behavioral inference.
The non-retail operators building commerce media
One of the fastest-growing segments of commerce media in 2024 and 2025 has been financial services.
Chase Media Solutions connects advertisers to cardholders based on actual spending patterns across the full Chase ecosystem, reaching 80 million customers with retailer-agnostic purchase history. PayPal's advertising business draws on billions of real-time transactions from over 430 million active accounts, with payments powering tens of millions of businesses. Klarna launched a commerce media product built on buy-now-pay-later purchase data. A consistent pattern across many of them is that large transaction volumes plus direct customer relationships equal a monetizable data asset.
Travel followed a similar arc. Marriott International launched Marriott Media in 2025, backed by 237 million Bonvoy loyalty members and over 200 targetable audience attributes. Kinective Media by United Airlines launched the airline industry's first in-flight and app-based travel media network. Expedia and similar platforms have run ad businesses for years; the difference now is the scale of infrastructure investment and the intent to position these as standalone revenue streams rather than ancillary features.
Ticketing and live events complete the picture. A customer buying concert tickets reveals genre preferences, income range, and geography with precision that general audience data cannot approach. Commerce media in ticketing reaches buyers at the exact moment they have committed purchase intent for an experience.
The privacy-safe infrastructure
Commerce media networks are typically built on first-party data that operators collect directly from their own customers: purchase history, transaction records, and in-app behavior that has never touched third-party tracking infrastructure. This can create a structural privacy advantage: the data does not depend on cookies, device IDs, or cross-site tracking systems that are being deprecated across browsers and mobile operating systems.
Where commerce media networks combine signals across multiple operators, they do so through data clean rooms, environments where audience matching and targeting logic happen on aggregated data without individual customer records being transferred to advertisers. Brands get the benefit of cross-network purchase signals; neither the operator’s customer data nor the advertiser’s CRM is exposed in the process.
This architecture is one reason financial services and healthcare companies — sectors with strict data governance requirements under GDPR, CCPA, and sector-specific regulations — can participate in commerce media without creating compliance exposure. The privacy protection is a technical constraint built into how the targeting is executed.
The sections above describe how retail media and commerce media are commonly understood across the industry. Within that broader landscape, different platforms emphasize different moments in the customer journey.
How Rokt sits in this landscape
Rokt’s approach to commerce media is centered on the Transaction Moment, the window spanning product selection through to purchase confirmation. The Rokt Network operates across more than 33,000 active clients spanning retail, airlines, ticketing platforms, food delivery companies, and financial services, processing more than 10 billion transactions annually across 1.1 billion unique customers globally.
The network’s performance illustrates what can happen when targeting runs on confirmed transaction signals rather than browsing inference. Rokt Ads delivers a 4.03% average click-through rate, 10 times the Google Display benchmark and 4 times Facebook. The 6.32% average conversion rate on Rokt Ads placements reflects the performance that Transaction Moment inventory can produce when the targeting is grounded in a live purchase signal rather than a probabilistic audience segment. For comparison, that CTR rivals high-intent search, despite running at the post-purchase stage rather than the pre-purchase discovery stage.
The AI that powers Rokt’s placement decisions has been trained on 1.95 trillion data points across the network. In practice, this means placement decisions are informed by what customers who match this customer’s profile have done across the entire network, not just within one retailer’s isolated dataset.
For ecommerce partners, Rokt’s products, Rokt Catalog, Rokt Upcart, Rokt Pay+, and Rokt Thanks, monetize existing transaction touchpoints without requiring the operator to build any advertising infrastructure. Rokt returns $7 of every $8 of value generated back to the partner.
For advertisers, Rokt Ads provides access to verified transaction audiences across all the verticals Rokt operates in simultaneously; a single buy that activates purchase signals from retail, travel, ticketing, delivery, and financial services at once.
Frequently asked questions about commerce media vs. retail media
Is retail media a subset of commerce media, or are they separate categories?
Retail media is a vertical application of the broader commerce media category. While every retail media network (RMN) operates on commerce media principles—using first-party transaction data to power advertising—most commerce media networks are not retailers. Commerce media is the "horizontal" layer that includes any high-frequency transactional business, such as banks, airlines, and apps.
Can a retailer use both models simultaneously?
Yes. A retailer running an endemic RMN (sponsored search) can also participate in the broader commerce media ecosystem by activating post-transaction inventory. While retail media captures "Discovery and Consideration" intent on the digital shelf, commerce media captures "Adjacent Intent" in the moments immediately following a purchase, allowing the retailer to monetize non-endemic brands (e.g., a grocery store showing a travel insurance offer).
Which model offers better performance for advertisers?
Both can outperform standard display and social because they rely on deterministic data rather than probabilistic modeling. However, their strengths differ by objective:
- Retail media is typically stronger for demand capture and SKU-level sales within a specific store.
- Commerce media can be stronger for customer acquisition (CAC) and cross-sell opportunities, depending on the context and implementation.
Does participating in a commerce media network require sharing customer PII?
No. Leading commerce media networks use data clean rooms and AI orchestration to ensure customer PII (Personally Identifiable Information) stays with the operator. For example, the matching and personalization logic runs on aggregated or anonymised signals inside the clean room; the operator's customer records are never transferred to the advertiser.
What is the "Transaction Moment" and why does it matter?
The Transaction Moment (a term coined by Rokt) is the peak window of customer attention and trust, spanning from product selection to purchase confirmation. Unlike "search intent," which is exploratory, the Transaction Moment is action-based intent. Commerce media networks that activate this window often report conversion rates multiple times higher than pre-purchase placements because the customer is already in an active buying state: receptive to relevant adjacent offers rather than being interrupted mid-browsing.
How do the two models handle measurement and attribution?
Retail media focuses on SKU-level attribution, closing the loop within the retailer's own inventory. Commerce media can enable broader, ecosystem-level attribution in some implementations, using verified purchase events across the entire network to measure long-term Lifetime Value (LTV). Commerce media's closed-loop model observes whether a customer who saw an ad at one transaction point made a subsequent qualifying purchase, confirmed by a hard transaction signal rather than a modeled estimate.
.jpeg)
