The silos between retailer, sales, and marketing are rapidly dissolving and retail media is the force driving that convergence. Global retail media spend is expected to exceed US$200 billion by 2027 (WARC). 65% of marketers say Retail Media Networks will take a larger share of their media mix in the year ahead (Nielsen), and WPP forecasts that commerce advertising will hit US$178.2 billion in 2025, surpassing global TV ad revenue for the first time.
Retail media is no longer a bolt-on. It has become a primary discovery engine, where search, social, and the shelf collapse into a single, full-funnel environment. For CPG brands, this shift is existential: the places people buy are now the places people are found.
Sandra Trillo, one of Flock’s Principal Consultant and Connections Lead has this advice “Treat Connected Commerce as an owned platforms you must master, not just buy. That requires joined up sales and marketing planning, budgeting, deals, measurement, and of course different content”.
Smart companies are redesigning their operating models to build integrated, connected-commerce capabilities, and restructuring agency rosters accordingly. Instead of separate media, shopper, and promotions teams serving siloed sales and marketing functions, they are creating unified commerce teams that own strategy across the entire retailer ecosystem. Agencies, too, are rapidly evolving dedicated connected-commerce offerings to meet this shift.
But ask yourself: Is your connected-commerce process as refined, orchestrated, and high-quality as your TV ad development process? Probably not, and yet connected commerce is now a larger and arguably more critical channel.
Perhaps this is the year to close that gap.
Marketing is undergoing a structural reset. AI is redefining how decisions are made, creators and culture are reshaping how brands earn attention, and connected commerce is collapsing the gap between demand and conversion. These aren’t trends to track, they’re fault lines that will determine which brands accelerate and which fall behind. CMOs now face a pivotal choice – redesign the marketing organisation for this new reality or risk being outpaced by those who
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