The Marketing Funnel Is Being Rewritten. Here’s How Transaction-Based Advertising Is Changing the Game.
Here’s how to navigate the $140B shift to transaction-based advertising.
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Key Takeaways
- Point of Purchase is not merely the endpoint of the funnel, but has now become the critical touchpoint for generating brand demand.
- While retail media is limited to retail and consumer packaged goods ecosystems, it is actually part of a bigger trend: commerce media.
- Commerce media models give advertisers cross-merchant intelligence and deep consumer intent signals across everyday life experiences — from booking a flight to paying a bill.
- To target intent-driven customers, leaders in enterprises will have to go beyond simple media buys and align their digital shelf, search and commerce media spending in retail, finance and travel ecosystems.
Beyond all the jargon, digital advertising is now at a watershed moment: The transactional end of the marketing funnel isn’t simply the endgame; it’s the critical touchpoint where demand is generated, gathered and fulfilled.
For quite some time now, digital marketing has relied upon a well-known separation of responsibilities. Brand awareness has been handled by social media and digital video, search engines facilitated discovery, and trade promotions have been conducted in brick-and-mortar stores. Not anymore.
If you are a corporate executive, brand marketer, or investor operating in the current media environment, grasping this transition will be essential for grasping two inter-related ideas: retail media and commerce media.
Comprehension of retail media from a PoP perspective
Retail media at its most basic level is defined as an advertisement placed in a retailer’s digital or physical property by leveraging their own shoppers’ data at or close to the time of purchase.
Retail media covers anything from branded product searches on Amazon or Walmart and display ads in a mobile application to loyalty email marketing and sophisticated digital signage in brick-and-mortar aisles.
As I have covered in depth in my article on what retail media is and how to be successful with it in 2026, retail media is the digital version of conventional shopper marketing. It’s not that end-cap and aisle displays aren’t around anymore; they’ve become addressable, measurable and biddable.
Retail media sits across three main formats:
- Onsite media: Sponsored search and display ads on a retailer’s site or app — the highest-intent digital real estate available.
- Offsite media: Ads on programmatic web, connected TV (CTV) or social channels, targeted and measured using the retailer’s first-party purchase data.
- In-store digital media: Smart cooler doors, digital shelf screens and self-checkout displays that bridge the digital-physical store divide.
Why is capital pouring into retail media so aggressively? Three forces are driving it:
- Closed-loop attribution: Connecting an ad impression directly to a verified receipt eliminates the guesswork of traditional attribution models.
- First-party data durability: As third-party cookie signals continue to degrade, verified transaction records remain the gold standard for audience targeting.
- Margin expansion for retailers: Retail operates on notoriously thin margins, whereas selling media provides exceptionally high-margin revenue streams.
Nonetheless, brand executives should ignore the headline statistics. Branding investments are highly skewed toward the high-end platforms such as Amazon Ads and Walmart Connect. For success at the point of sale, you need to fix your digital shelf (optimize title, image and review), differentiate between defensive branding investment and offensive category investment and demand normalized incrementality metrics.
Broader Horizons: Expanding into commerce media
Whereas retail media is limited to retail and CPG ecosystems, it is actually a part of a bigger trend in structural shifts: commerce media.
Commerce media takes the notion way beyond the supermarket aisles or the app. It includes any organization that possesses a first-party transaction ledger and constructs advertising infrastructure to capitalize on it.
In the process of creating a strategy for multi-channel growth, it is important for media executives to analyze the operational structure that works best for their product cycle. According to Kontrol Media, it is useful to look into the main types of commerce media network models in order to understand how they work in various industries. The types include:
- Retail media networks (RMNs): Powered by SKU-level purchase data within a single retail platform (e.g., Instacart Ads, Walmart Connect).
- Financial media networks: Leveraging cross-merchant transaction histories from banks and payment processors to capture wallet-share signals and conquest opportunities (e.g., Chase Media Solutions, PayPal Ads).
- Travel and hospitality networks: Monetizing travel itineraries, seat selections and hotel bookings (e.g., Marriott Media Network, United Airlines Kinective Media).
- Delivery and rideshare networks: Capitalizing on hyper-local, real-time location and order data (e.g., Uber Advertising, DoorDash Ads).
- Marketplace & White-Label Networks: Aggregated multi-seller commerce infrastructure and custom-built enterprise networks for niche verticals.
Where retail media delivers granular, SKU-level conversion precision within one retailer, broader commerce media models give advertisers cross-merchant intelligence and deep consumer intent signals across everyday life experiences — from booking a flight to paying a bill.
Strategic takeaways for business leaders
With changing search behaviors, AI-assisted shopping and new privacy settings that affect traditional tracking technologies, retail and commerce media is no longer optional; it forms the base layer of the contemporary commerce strategy.
For securing market share in today’s world:
- Integration of search, AI and retail media: Your product detail page and reviews contribute to both retail algorithms for conversion and AI-powered answer algorithms. Look at SEO, AEO, GEO and retail media at point of purchase as one demand engine.
- Category-specificity over network hype: Spend your money on where your category works versus trying to buy every single media network that pops up.
- Rigorously audit measurement: Create a standard layer of reporting for all commerce and retail media networks for measuring incremental revenue so that your media spend contributes towards making those additional sales.
With this approach, brands will be able to get their hands on a high-intent audience through connected discovery platforms.
Key Takeaways
- Point of Purchase is not merely the endpoint of the funnel, but has now become the critical touchpoint for generating brand demand.
- While retail media is limited to retail and consumer packaged goods ecosystems, it is actually part of a bigger trend: commerce media.
- Commerce media models give advertisers cross-merchant intelligence and deep consumer intent signals across everyday life experiences — from booking a flight to paying a bill.
- To target intent-driven customers, leaders in enterprises will have to go beyond simple media buys and align their digital shelf, search and commerce media spending in retail, finance and travel ecosystems.
Beyond all the jargon, digital advertising is now at a watershed moment: The transactional end of the marketing funnel isn’t simply the endgame; it’s the critical touchpoint where demand is generated, gathered and fulfilled.
For quite some time now, digital marketing has relied upon a well-known separation of responsibilities. Brand awareness has been handled by social media and digital video, search engines facilitated discovery, and trade promotions have been conducted in brick-and-mortar stores. Not anymore.
If you are a corporate executive, brand marketer, or investor operating in the current media environment, grasping this transition will be essential for grasping two inter-related ideas: retail media and commerce media.
