I recently started a new job.

Here is my hot take: I think my goal should be to put myself out of that job.

*For anyone at Omnicom: I want to be very clear, I love my job and would very much like to keep my employment for a long time. Please continue reading!

I don’t mean literally put myself out of a job. I mean something I challenge myself to think about whenever I take on a new role.

What would have to become so normal that people stopped asking for the specialty team to jump in and simply just know what to do?

I have spent most of my career in specialty roles. First it was digital activation, then performance marketing, retail media, commerce and the list goes on.

That means I have also spent a lot of my career hearing certain barriers. That’s their team or this sits over here, as if the org chart somehow changes the business problem in front of us.

I understand why specialties exist (again, I am one). There is always a need to have that deep expertise. Particularly on new and fast moving areas. But I have never been very interested in protecting artificial barriers between teams. I usually want to know how I can make the rest of the system work better together

So now that I am Global Head of Commerce, there is one question I keep coming back to:

What would Commerce look like if we didn’t even need to call it Commerce?

I have tried to kill retail media before

This is not the first time I have gone down this path.

Earlier in my career, I moved from a role on the brand side of the industry at Georgia-Pacific back to the agency side to help build out the Commerce & Retail Media practice at dentsu.

It was 2019, so I was doing a ridiculous amount of education around what retail media even was. I may be prone to hyperbole but I really think I did a State of Retail Media presentation over 100 times. If there was a tech malfunction I could describe the slides while presenting the thing.

A lot of legacy media people could not understand why on earth CPG brands were suddenly moving so much money into what looked like an antiquated media buying model.

At the time, brands and agencies were pushing media partners for self-service buying, custom audiences and deeper platform integrations. Retail media was exploding too, but it was harder to operate in the same way. There was lots of managed service, retailer-owned audiences, no third-party tracking and systems that barely talked to the rest of the media ecosystem. Basically the let us grade our own homework phase. Even when we pushed back, the response was basically, yeah…but they are the retailer.

That disconnect confused people. Why were CPG brands pouring more money into something that looked like media buying was moving backward?

It wasn’t just the agencies either. Brands were feeling conflicted. Retailers kept asking for more investment and it was causing tension between brand marketers and sales teams. The different perspectives ranged from this is a great marketing opportunity to this sounds like some form of extortion.

I was constantly explaining retail media from every direction. I even did education sessions for retail organizations to help them understand how brands experienced them (see commentary above).

Every single time I had one of those presentations, I used the same slide to define Retail Media.

It said Retail Media as the headline. Except I would put a strikethrough through the word Retail.

~~Retail~~ Media.

My talk track was simple, retail media is just media. I thought I was being so clever every time I got to share my definition. Retail media is simply a retailer monetizing its data and properties.

The reason I used that definition was because it’s not particularly unique to retailers. That’s ANY media publisher. They monetize their data and their properties.

If you have ad inventory and data worth monetizing, chances are you will eventually try and monetize it. That’s just showbiz.

But the inventory was never the most interesting part about retail media (although some really cool stuff now with Prime Video, VIZIO and more). It has always been the data for me.

Retailers know what people actually bought and were getting increasingly more effective at identifying which marketing activities influenced the sale. That felt much more interesting to me than simply creating another way to buy ads.

That became the part of retail media I obsessed over. As you can probably tell, I still do.

I still believe retail media is just media

For years, my argument was that brand media and retail media are just media.

I said that they should be connected because separating them creates wasted spend (literally millions), inconsistent behaviors and competing objectives.

I may have been onto something back then but 2019 Mike was thinking too small.

I thought the convergence was mostly about where media got bought. Retail media. Brand media. It’s all just media. Let’s stop forcing consumers into the same boxes we use in our orgs and on our P&Ls.

Today my focus is about what the rest of marketing can learn from Commerce.

Social is where this becomes really obvious to me

Let me play this scenario out. Give me a CPG brand, their Meta account and permission to ignore their org chart for five minutes.

I would start by going heavy on organic social. Let’s make a whole lot of content. Different hooks, different claims, different product benefits, formats, creators, etc. Put all of it into the market and let actual human behavior tell us what resonates (measure this based off organic reach as Meta rewards distribution for content that resonates).

I love a good creative waterfall test. Find your winning variables and establish thresholds for when a creative really hits and warrants paid amplification.

Once we start putting media behind it, it’s Commerce’s time to shine. I want to use retail data to identify if the audience is new to the brand. Are they already loyal? Do they currently buy a competitor? Which messages actually change purchase behavior by cohort?

Retailer integrations enable rich signals for targeting AND data to inform more accountable measurement. Did they buy after seeing our ad? Did they buy at Kroger? Somewhere else? Did they ever buy it again? Are we using real time inventory signals? Personally, if the product is out of stock around me here in Atlanta, please stop spending money convincing me to go buy it (we both end up losing).

The more frustrating part is that we still cannot always run it that way. We have one social campaign running through the brand team and another campaign through an RMN managed-service. The result is essentially two completely separate campaigns with zero connectivity. Different buying structures, different audiences. Even basic things like frequency management cannot be tracked across the two initiatives.

That’s the part that drives me crazy. We have all this incredible data and then put it in a separate campaign where it doesn’t even matter.

I want to run Meta the way great teams run Meta. I just want to add Commerce intelligence to the system.

Buy like Brand. Learn like Commerce.

That is increasingly where I think the industry is going.

Brand media has spent decades getting really good at creating demand. We can reach people at scale and tell stories that resonate. Commerce has built on a different foundation, using purchase data and sales outcomes to understand what actually changed behavior.

So if I could wave my magic wand, I would buy media using the best of Brand, then learn from the outcome using the best of Commerce.

What actually drove sales? What changed behavior? What should we do differently next time?

That’s the future of Commerce I care about.

Maybe Commerce is a way of thinking

I used to think the big convergence was retail media eventually becoming part of all media.

Fast forward to today and I think the bigger opportunity is Commerce becoming part of how marketing decisions get made.

Purchase behavior improving audience strategies (and IDs used as the connective tissue across platforms). Inventory signals used to keep us from spending money to create demand in places where there is nothing available to buy.

And it absolutely works the other way too.

I grew up a media practitioner. There are things a creative leader sees in culture, storytelling and human behavior that I simply do not. It’s why I try to befriend so many.

The goal is pretty simple: the good stuff needs to travel.

Commerce should learn from creative. Creative should learn from sales. Media should get smarter from purchase behavior. And none of us should particularly care which part of the org gets credit.

If that makes the lines between Commerce and everything else a little messier, then I am here to roll up my sleeves and figure it out together.

So what exactly am I trying to put out of a job?

Not Commerce practitioners. And certainly not Commerce expertise (I’d argue we need more!).

Amazon will keep launching new capabilities. Walmart will keep evolving. TikTok Shop will keep disrupting our perceptions of what modern commerce looks like. Something none of us are talking about yet will eventually show up and become the next big thing. (Did your mind immediately go to Agentic Commerce?)

This is why I believe deeply in specialists. Most of the innovation I’ve seen starts with someone getting under the hood, nerding out and getting a few steps ahead simply by understanding how the thing works first.

But once we figure something out, the goal isn’t to hoard that knowledge forever. If every media planner still needs a Commerce person sitting next to them just to use purchase-based audiences or measurement, we’ve already lost.

The specialty should keep moving toward the next frontier. The intelligence should spread behind it.

Back to the new job

Which brings me back to the new job. Or soon to be my old job? *Again, kidding.

I am still very early. At the time of this writing, I am still doing onboarding 1:1s, so I have a lot more to learn before I pretend I know exactly how everything should work. That is part of why I write these Field Notes in the first place.

But I do know one thing on my mind as I enter the role. I do not want to build a bigger Commerce island.

I want Commerce showing up in the places where decisions are being made. And I want to add confidence when we answer questions like did our efforts work and did it move the business (sales).

When I said retail media is just media back in 2019, I meant it. I just don’t think I understood how big that idea could become.

If I do this job really well, the job itself should keep changing.

For someone who spent years crossing out the name of the thing I was building, that feels like the right place to start.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

The Modern Commerce Field Guide

Field Note #6: For Commerce to Win, It May…