Last week I moderated a panel at The Drum's inaugural Global Commerce Leaders Forum, alongside the Possible conference. The panel featured Sarah Marzano (eMarketer), Shawn McGahee (Roundel), Molly Hjelm (Ace Hardware/RedVest Media), and Sean Crawford (SMG), and accompanied the release of SMG's new commerce media maturity report.
We covered a lot of ground, but the sharpest moments came in the lightning round, when I asked each panelist: what's one thing you'd fix in the next 12 months to make a retail media network meaningfully more mature? Their answers reflect the hottest topics in retail media today.
Embrace the "retail" in retail media
Molly Hjelm is the Corporate Vice President, Retail Media, Ace Hardware (RedVest Media), and her answer got right to it: "We've spent so long wanting to be media companies and wanting to speak the language of media and kind of distancing ourselves from our retail ecosystems." Her pitch is for the industry to step into "the fullness of what it means to be a retail media network" — bringing merchants along, identifying business pain points with data, and solving them with media.
Ace launched RedVest Media in 2025, which gave Hjelm the advantage of building merchant relationships into the foundation rather than retrofitting them. Her team led with performance — real-time measurement, incrementality, new-to-brand stats — and the merchants came around because the data showed it worked. They now see retail media as a tool in their own toolkit, not something bolted onto the side of the business. (I profiled Molly's approach in more depth last year)
Hjelm also made the case for differentiation. Ace isn't a low-cost retailer — it's a high-service one, with 5,200 stores within 15 miles of 75% of Americans. If you're a grill company, you want customers in a store where trained staff can walk them through specs, compare products across the line, and even deliver an assembled grill to their home within an hour via Uber Eats or DoorDash. That kind of human-led service is not something you build with ad tech.
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Agree on the math first
Shawn McGahee, Senior Director, Performance & Insights, Roundel (Target), landed on collaboration — not as a platitude, but as a disposition the industry hasn't had to develop before. "We need to agree on what's the version of truth upfront, and then spend our time talking about performance — not arguing about the math."
McGahee has been at Roundel for eight months, but he's watched the network evolve for years as one of the earliest players in retail media in the US. In its earlier phase, Target's media business was seen as a high-margin operation that sat to the side — not really dependent on merchant involvement. That's shifted. Brand partners now expect alignment. Merchants want to know that a Roundel investment is changing guest behavior, not just shifting budgets around.
But he was candid about the other edge of that sword. There's a risk that partners feel strong-armed when the merchant is in the room — as though declining a media investment could carry shelf-space consequences. McGahee's response: his team focuses on standing behind the incrementality and the changes in consumer behavior, "so that it feels like a partnership." I've written about this tension from the brand side — the complexity when merchant and media teams operate in separate orbits in Brands Are From Mars, Retailers Are From Venus.
Find your north star
Sarah Marzano, VP & Principal Analyst, Commerce Media at EMARKETER urged RMNs to start planning long-term. The past few years were defined by rapid growth off a small base, and MARKETER's forecast shows things getting harder before they get easier. "The RMNs that are going to survive are going to be the ones who figure out what their north star is."
She also identified a new friction layer that signals where the market is heading. The familiar problems — fragmentation, resource strain, measurement gaps — haven't gone away. But ad buyers are now noticing when merchant and media teams aren't working in sync, and when the precision they expect from digital media doesn't translate to messier in-store environments. That second layer of friction, Marzano argued, is where the differentiation opportunities actually sit.
She also offered a useful re-frame for retailers who are fixated on replicating Amazon's ad business. Amazon holds roughly 40% of US e-commerce but only about 5% of total retail. They don't have physical stores at scale, and they lack the category depth that specialty retailers bring. The white space is real — but there's no blueprint ready to copy. McGahee put it more bluntly: "Most of the things you could copy from Amazon as a retail media network have already been done. That time has ended."
Break down the silos
Sean Crawford, Managing Director, SMG North America, had a direct answer: challenge the status quo within your retail organization and focus on the customer experience. He pointed to the problem of siloed selling — different teams responsible for different media formats, different parts of marketing, creating a disjointed experience for brands. His warning: if we don't break those silos down, the industry risks stagnating.
For an industry that's grown fast by adding new capabilities, the next phase seems to be less about building and more about connecting what already exists — inside the retailer, between the retailer and the brand, and across a measurement framework that everyone can agree on.
Catch me at Signal to Scale!
I'm keynoting at Xnurta's Signal to Scale summit on May 19 in Chicago.
This is the room to be in if you work in retail media, care about what AI actually changes, and want to leave with something you can put to work. A full day focused on agentic AI, modern measurement, and the strategies the best teams are already building toward. Reserve your spot here.
