As commerce media explodes, and brands and retailers navigate shifting relationships, marketers face new challenges in breaking down silos and aligning measurement.

At the Cannes Lions Festival, brand marketers from Clorox, General Mills and Sanofi joined connected commerce platform Stackline and ADWEEK’s editor-in-chief Ryan Joe to discuss how they’re reaching consumers amid that changing landscape.

Silos stifle retail media’s potential

While retail and commerce media have become one of the buzziest corners of the ad world, a lot of the goals remain the same for brands, noted General Mills’ head of experience Sarah Leinberger.

“We want to help [our customers] solve their everyday problems and ideally, create joy within their lives, within those small moments, and create the solutions across different data sets,” Leinberger said. “It’s just baby steps … there’s just a lot of work to be done.”

Still, challenges remain for brands looking to execute those plans within retail media networks (RMNs) where the retail media teams operate separately from their sales or merchandizing teams.

“We have data now to tell us what’s working and what’s not [and] to be able to pivot more quickly,” said Sanofi CMO Claudine Patel. “I’m still struggling with connecting that with our retailers in a holistic way. So the conversations we have, it’s either with their retail media team or their buyers … it’s still quite siloed.”

Toward better measurement

Measuring across retail or commerce media networks is still “apples and oranges,” said Leinberger. “Sometimes they’re not even fruit,” added Clorox svp and CMO Eric Schwartz. Efforts to make those cross-platform metrics easier to compare are still nascent.

In the meantime, Leinberger and Schwartz both highlighted the importance of relationship building with those retailers, commerce partners and consumers to ensure that better measurement comes online, they can make the most informed decisions.

“It’s more about the relationship than it is about smart media spends,” Schwartz said. “When we have the data flowing, it becomes very much about smart media spends.”

Incorporating AI

While generative AI is undoubtedly changing the whole media and marketing ecosystem, it has specific applications in commerce media. That includes speeding up development workflows to transforming the way people meal plan.

“Being able to generate at scale real personalization, customization, sequencing of messaging—it’s just impossible to do with humans,” Schwartz said.

For Clorox, the company is also using AI to help sort its own data to find more valuable insights and better support its internal operations, he said.

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