Commerce Media's Day Two: The Agentic Shelf and the Measurement Reckoning

0:00Hello and welcome to Future Commerce, the podcast at the intersection of culture and commerce. I'm Philip.

0:04Collin Colburn: And I'm Alicia. Today, we have a very special guest. I feel like I should be on my best behavior because I feel like I'm being overseen by, you know, a bureau. Like I feel like an oversight. No, it's actually an incredible time because we've been talking a lot for the last couple years about the evolution in our industry. In fact, we just relaunched futurecommerce.com to refocus on the evolution in our industry and how retail media, commerce media has really taken center stage and how advertising and commerce are now one in the same. And so today to come talk about how at the center of it all is the IAB and how we are leading the conversation and bringing standards and best practices around these conversations about retail and commerce media.

0:49So without any further ado, he is the vice president of commerce and retail media at IAB, where he leads the commerce center of excellence and helps shape the standards, research, and best practices defining the next era of the category. And today he leads commerce's biggest questions. What comes next? What comes after retail media's growth at all costs era? What happens with AI agents when they become shoppers? And how marketers measure that influence in the world? Welcome Colin Colburn to Future Commerce. Thank you both for having me. Super, super excited to be here and really looking forward to the conversation.

1:21Yeah, really, really happy to have you take some time to join us. It's your first time here, first time to have the IAB join us. You spent a decade at Forrester, you know, and also in the agency side. And now you're in the standard seat at IAB. You have a really interesting vantage point in the industry from that vantage point. Let's talk a little bit about what retail media is doing right now and how, you know, in your perspective, retail media is taking center stage in 2026. Yeah, I do have an awesome seat here. We are really the industry convener, bringing all parties together. And we do have a unique vantage point because of that.

2:00And the way that I think about where retail media, where it's come from and where it's going, it's really moved from this like great expansionary era of everyone has launched a network, a media network. Every retailer, every commerce player, whatever you want to be in travel, financial services. Everyone, it feels like, has launched a media network. And now we're moving more towards an optimization, maturity, building of a larger ecosystem sort of phase. That's how I would at least kind of phrase the moment that we are in, which is a really interesting one, because we've had five years of really incredible, five plus years of really incredible growth.

2:46Retail media globally this year is going to surpass$100 billion USD. That's a big number. Here in the U.S., it's going to be about$70 billion. I think that's in 2028. So we're, you know, we are a large category these days. And it didn't take very long to get here. So there's naturally this, I'm going to call it a correction. You know, we're not seeing declining budgets necessarily. But we're seeing things starting to flatten a little bit, as they naturally do during these explosive expansionary growth eras. I've gone deep down the rabbit hole over the last few months in building custom AI harnesses and skills around foundation models to make future commerce better every single day.

3:39And that started at building a vector database and then a custom harness for us to be able to search future commerce's archives and to build a skill so that whenever we do anything for any kind of text search, we're searching future commerce's archives. And all of that relies on a foundation model. But when most of us think of foundation models, we're thinking of text generation. But text generation is not what AI is by default. Most people, when they are interacting with AI, are interacting with things that aren't primarily text. I saw a stat that one in six Google searches today are multimodal.

4:18Think about that for a second. One in six searches are a voice search or an image search or a camera search or some sort of search that's other than text entered into a box. So I think that the way that we're searching, the modes that we are expecting to be able to search with are already changing. And that means our interactions online, our expectations for the interactions online are changing too. And so the foundation models that we use for driving those AI interactions have to change as well. And that's what makes me think about our new partner, Eleven Labs, because Eleven Labs is the frontier lab building the voice layer for the next generation of customer experience.

5:03Voice agents, they are the frontline. They support, they sell, they guide, they answer a customer's needs. And they can get you from intent, they can get you to action, and they can do it in real time. And there are plenty of brands that are using Eleven Labs infrastructure to support millions of customers. Companies like Klarna, who supports 35 million customers, and Revolut, who has deployed 11 Labs agents to resolve issues eight times faster in as much as 30 languages. Brands from e-commerce and retail and customer operations are building on 11 Labs voice agent infrastructure. And for commerce, I think this matters so much because the best kinds of customer experiences have always been the ones that take place in a conversation.

5:49And that kind of conversation doesn't just happen on the sales floor anymore. It can happen anywhere. And so if someone shows up in your support channel, you still want your support channel, even if it's driven by an agent, to be able to sell. And so now it finally can. Shopping, support, returns, product education, international markets, anywhere the customer has intent, but the interface is getting in the way. That's what Eleven Labs is building. It's one voice for your brand across multiple customer touch points and almost any language. And it's at real scale. So if you're thinking about what happens when customers are not typing, when they stop typing and they start talking, start thinking about Eleven Labs.

6:33Build the agent, give your brand a voice and meet your customer the way that they already want to be communicated with. So go to elevenlabs.io slash futurecommerce. That's elevenlabs.io slash futurecommerce. one voice for your brand across multiple customer touchpoints. That's 11labs.io slash futurecommerce. And tell them Philip sent you. Let's get back to the show. I saw that McKinsey had a figure. If you count commerce media, if we sort of like expand the aperture, count commerce media as total value in 2026 is as big as 1.3 trillion. I think that that's, I mean, depending on who you're reading, we're talking about like extraordinary economic value globally, right?

7:17And so I think, yeah, standards need to be applied here. And I think you use the word commerce media in a blog post. We'll link it up here. And you said the word day two, which I think is a little bit of a... In this industry, we talk a lot about Amazon's day one. You said commerce media is hitting day two in this IAB blog post. Tell us a little bit about that and how we're past the growth at all costs adolescence phase and give us a little bit of some of the markers and milestones of what you're calling a day two period. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I mentioned, you know, the launching of those networks.

7:54I don't even, no one even knows how many networks there are. It's not worth counting anymore, right? It's in the hundreds. It was very much around monetizing the traffic, the customer journeys that you as a retailer or as a commerce player had proximity to and attracting advertisers that wanted to get in front of those consumer journeys. So that was a very natural sort of first day, first era. And now we have a lot of needs around more sophisticated measurement. We've put out a lot of work in both the on-site and in-store retail media measurement space in terms of what does maturity, what do good standards look like when it comes to measurement.

8:45and with that, more interoperable measurements so that you're not only able to better compare across retailers, but also retail media next to all my other forms of media, whether that is social, search, display, et cetera. The other thing that I think about in this sort of like day two era is that retail media was initially built as a bolt-on to the core business of mostly retail, right? And what that looked like was that you had the retail business, which was very, for those who might not come from a retail sort of background, it is a merchant-led business. Merchants control the business because they control product, they control how it is distributed, how consumers experience or get that product.

9:38And media was very much, or advertising, whatever you want to call it, was very much a, all right, this is going to be something that's going to live over here. It's going to be separate from the business because we want sort of like the customer experience to be sacred and kept the way that we want it to look by the merchant team. And advertising is kind of, in some ways, conflicted with that. So we want to have it over here. And it worked for a bit of time. But now we're starting to see those operational challenges and friction points, especially as media starts to enter into the store, which is very much controlled by merchants, IT, store operators, or if you're a franchise model, individual owners.

10:24and now it's forcing that conversation to happen of well how do these two areas live harmonious harmoniously together so that's I think one of the big underpinnings of this day two if you will is that operational excellence in terms of how media is woven into the overall customer experience and how it is additive to that customer experience that's the work that's happening now that's going to take years to kind of figure out what that balance looks like. And I think it's going to mean different operating models. So you're not going to have a media network just totally separate over here. They're in a separate office or in a separate area of the business.

11:11They're going to have to be woven into the broader retail business. And you see that on the brand side as well. suppliers, CPGs, FMCGs that supply products to these retailers, they're having to reckon with this a little bit too, in terms of you always had the trade and sales teams really control that relationship with the retailer. Well, now that media spend has grown tremendously with a given retailer, national media teams, shopper marketers, digital marketers have to be part of that conversation and negotiation with the retailer. And that's making them reconsider, how do we organize all this?

11:50How do we think about marketing in this new way of operating?

11:55Collin Colburn: Colin, I want to jump in here because I'm curious, you have this macro view of the industry and all of the different operating models. You mentioned friction points. What are some of the most common friction points that you see emerge as these models and offerings expand? And like, which have an advantage like from an operational standpoint? Because, you know, what I've noticed just in my daily media consumption and just being a consumer is how commerce media is really permeating into areas that didn't exist a year ago. I mean, we're seeing it more in CTV, Even influencer marketing has a presence in all these different factors.

12:41Collin Colburn: So what are the friction points and which companies, which providers have that advantage as they strive to recalibrate? Like what does collaboration and operations look like in this era? Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of friction points. One, probably the biggest one is the friction between retailers and brands today and the incentives that drive both of them. So retailers, naturally, they want to maximize media revenue. And a lot of that is to drive increased margin, especially in some of these areas of retail where margins are incredibly low. That was the promise of building a retail media network was that it was going to grow margin.

13:22And you've seen that happen with some of the biggest ones for sure. Now, at the same time, brands, the suppliers, care about category growth. They care about brand experience. They care about improving the overall efficacy of their campaigns that they're running, regardless of who it's being run with. And you see this notion in the industry a lot from the brands and agencies, you know, saying retail media has become a tax. Like it is a tax on my ability to grow category. And, you know, I can understand why they think that. So that's probably the biggest one that has come to the surface. And it's because the category has grown so much, right?

14:14Because you see brands being sort of required by some of their retailers to spend X percent more year on year. And the brand is asking, well, why should I spend more if you're not able to show me that you're selling X percent more of my product, getting it off the shelf? That's going to lead to more to more sales for me. And that's why I'm sure you guys hear this term all the time. But incrementality has become so critical in the commerce space. And it's really interesting because it's almost like this focus on what is incremental, aka did my media drive, did it drive incremental sales that it wouldn't have driven if I hadn't had that media.

15:02That has really ballooned the importance of incrementality in marketing and media overall, regardless of channel. You see being talked about in every corner of our industry of advertising today. And I think a lot of it's because of this exact friction point within retail media between brands and retailers. I don't want to take us off course, Alicia, but you mentioned incrementality in a piece with eMarketer on the future of commerce media. I think specifically when I'm thinking about, you know, in that piece you were talking about, you know, around, I don't know, the future and agentic shelf, for instance.

15:45And I think that there is a, as we're all looking for incrementality all the time, right? Like, I think we spent the last few years very, very excited about, you know, new channel revenue and new opportunities around commerce media. I think maybe now we're all very excited about the potential of Agentec or maybe scared that Agentec might be shifting the type and the nature of a shopper that's coming into these commerce media channels that we've been investing in so heavily. They may not be engaging with the advertising that we've been driving our partners to and creating these partnerships around.

16:21Uh, give us a little bit about your perspective in the IAB's POV on Agentec and how that plays into the ecosystem where we have been prioritizing attention and trying to monetize attention. Um, and because it is such a key portion of so many people's strategy, uh, right now in the ecosystem. Yeah. I mean, what is, what is more talked about today than AI and especially in the world of retail, agentic commerce. It is, without a doubt, I think probably the most talked about. If you go to any event in this space, they're going to be talking about it. That's right. And in my view, agentic commerce isn't changing what consumers buy or want to buy today.

17:12It's changing their decision, their pathway to purchase. And there's a little bit, there's a bit of a difference there. It's that it's humans are not making the decision alone, right? The human is making the decision with an agent. And that's the current state today. And I think, I think too many people often start the conversation with, you know, agent of commerce is going to be this agent to agent, robots are buying everything for us. And yes, that might be the destination someday. And maybe it might be sooner than, you know, some far off year from now. But it's that's not that's not that's not the course that it's taking in this moment.

17:59And I think that's a key part of the conversation to me. So we're thinking a lot about going into next year, especially. I know we're almost in August here, but we're thinking about 2027 already. And I'm thinking about how do we define the spectrum of agentic commerce and what that sort of natural evolution might look like and what it means for retail, for retail media going forward? Because the consumer, you know, they're not disappearing today. Like, yes, we need to market to agents. You know, you hear that all the time in our space, too. But you still have to market to the consumer as well.

18:40So it's this dual mandate, I think, that I think is important. It's a nuance that's important for us to just acknowledge as an industry. The consumer is not giving up control. They're just changing their pathway that we have been used to recently. And I think that what that means for things like the shelf, you mentioned the agentic shelf. Well, brands have always competed for placement on the shelf, and that's taken many different manifestations over time. That's the physical shelf that they've had to jockey for. They still do that through joint business planning with their retailers. Then it turned into jockeying for search ranking in places like major search engines.

19:33And then it turned into sponsored product listings within retail.coms themselves. So we're like actually pretty well equipped, I think, to be able to handle this because we've seen this natural evolution over time. And it's not like, again, it's not like any of those things that I mentioned have gone away. We still have to actually manage those things. So this is just another another part of the shelf that we have to that we have to manage for is that, you know, it just sort of doubles down on like the shelf is not just physical. It's not just brick and mortar anymore. And it's not just e-commerce and digital either.

20:10It's it's both. And now you now you have the the agentic shelf. The agentic. Yeah, I guess. Who knows? Yeah, I guess. Yeah. And this is where I have been. I've made some forward looking predictions. I guess you can't do that without being called future commerce. And I guess our POV is that necessarily if an agent is acting on behalf of a human's intent, then the intent needs to move up higher in the funnel. And if the human's intent is based around like need state, right? And if that need state is around very specific desires of the human, whether it's to save some money or around fit or delivery time, then the advertising parameters need to move up the funnel necessarily as well too, so that the agent becomes aware of them.

21:04So like delivery capabilities, promotions, those things need to be surfaced in ad units so that the agent becomes aware of them, so that it can act on behalf of the human. Whereas today, a lot of our creative is appealing aesthetically to a human's desire. Now we do a lot of that in promo and things like 20 % off act now, but we're not doing it in a way that an agent can act on it in, in other ways that humans are communicating through context. And so those are things that I expect will probably shift very quickly because, and, and we, a lot, when we ask, um, we have a lot of primary research here at future commerce, Colin, that shows that, you know, 77 % of people we ask in our studies say they still want control.

21:50They want to click through and they want to finish the purchase. Right. But those 77 % of people are extraordinarily motivated to complete the purchase and they buy only the thing that's been recommended to them. But they're being told buy it from here and buy this specific thing. And they're being convinced of that by an agent who already did most of the shopping and decision making on their behalf. And so we're going to have to figure out that part around specifically ad units and ad creative that disintermediates that relationship with the agent on the retailer's website at some point. And I think the blocking right now, like the, the, the shutting down and the like agentic ghettos we're creating, like you can't come here.

22:31That's got to stop at some point too. Like this is a, that's a probably a bad practice. I'll add one more thing. I think you brilliantly said how, how the, um, how the sort of like the upper funnel experience is changing dramatically because of AI LLMs. The other thing that I would add on to it is that the coming reckoning is in the measurement space as well. Attribution was, let's call it what it is. It is an imperfect science for what we have been, our industry has wanted to believe a perfect, precise way of measuring marketing impact. And what AI is doing is it is making that gap, that difficulty level of being able to be precise that attribution has not been able to live up to, it's making that gap even wider.

23:30Because the intent is being, the intent signals are being lost upstream. Because attribution was built for an ad is served. It is either clicked on or seen. The customer goes to the website and they purchase. And that model does not work well in this new era, this more agentic driven era. So it's actually something we're working on. My colleague, Caroline Gigrich, who leads the AI Center of Excellence here at the IAB. I work very closely with her, as you might imagine. We're currently working on a blueprint. It's not really like we're not trying to put out any standards. We're not trying to say that attribution is dead.

24:15What we're trying to say is that this is happening and we need to think a little bit differently about what are the reasonable signals that we're going to be able to retain that attribution models live on? What are we going to lose? And with that, how should we be thinking differently about measurement and attribution going forward? And I don't have the full answers yet because we've just kicked this off about a month ago. Opening innings, I think, across the whole industry in general, right? So yeah, I think that that's the right move on y 'all's behalf. Best of luck in those.

24:53Collin Colburn: We will need it. I can't wait to see what comes out of that. And I think we hit on the implications of the agents acting on the consumer's behalf and what that means contextually on what retailers and brands need to deliver on the advertising side on site. But I have to ask, are there any implications of what's going to happen inevitably when advertising goes within these LLMs? Like I'm always seeing pieces recently about how OpenAI is scaling their advertising division. And granted, there are skepticism and there are doubts of how this model is actually going to roll out and what it looks like for the customer.

25:35Collin Colburn: But I guess there are two innate questions here. One, how does that impact the seemingly objective relationship consumers have with their agents when they go there looking for sound advice? And what are the implications for the commerce media industry as a whole? Are there any discussions or concerns emerging right now? It may be too soon to tell, but it seems like there's something ramping up over there in the open AI world. So any thoughts? I mean, yeah, a lot of thoughts. I would say it comes down to two things for me based on the questions you have. One is that there is absolutely focus and concern in the retail media, commerce media world for what more agent driven advertising, agent driven commerce means for retail media revenues.

26:29because if the consumer is being, is making their decision increasingly more in conversational experiences with LLMs, they're doing a whole heck of a lot less searching, clicking on the retailer site, which is going to reduce their ability to monetize that consumer on their site. So that's a big deal. Um, but the sort of like the, the, the silver lining at the moment is that retailers are actually benefiting from agent driven, um, uh, uh, shoppers today, agent referred shoppers today, because those shoppers are more likely to, um, not, uh, return their purchases, their, their purchase that they made.

27:19Um, they actually come with higher intent. So they have higher conversion rates, um, as well. So for now, it's actually a bit of a boon to retailers overall. Now, the thing that you mentioned before that I think is so interesting is, you know, as LLMs introduce ads into their experiences, that's going to be interesting to see how that plays out. Because consumers, I feel like as a consumer, at least, and I don't always like anecdotal evidence, but, you know, AI feels objective to me for the most part. Like you go to it because it's kind of like it's like your omnipotent friend that you never might have never had.

28:03Right. And when ads get introduced, it begs the question of, am I still going to trust that agent? And can they work or can they answer my questions without undermining the consumer trust piece? That'll be really interesting to see how that plays out. Now, unfortunately, that's about as smart as I get in that in that area, because that's where Caroline, who I mentioned before, goes a heck of a lot deeper than I do in terms of what's actually happening, because we know that there are ads that are being served within within LM experiences today. And they're they're doing a whole heck of a lot of testing to see what is that right balance or, you know, ability to balance trust with the need that they have to monetize.

28:56We'll get you back to future commerce in just a moment, but let's clear something up. You don't need more information. You already have a machine that you're sitting in front of right now that can summarize the entire internet in three seconds and confidently tell you the exact wrong thing. What you need is judgment because AI can tell you what happened or what's trending or what everyone else is already saying, but it can't tell you whether any of it matters or whether you'll regret acting on it in six months time. That's why we built Future Commerce Plus. Future Commerce Plus is the paid premium membership for executives, founders, and creatives who are tired of being impressed by the outputs of answer engines and they're more interested in making the right call for their business.

29:42It's less about speed and more about vision. As a Plus member, you will get long-form essays and research that connect commerce to culture and psychology to technology and all of it back to history. You get premium episodes and deep dives that we just don't publish publicly. And you'll get access to journals like lore, muses, and archetypes in our forthcoming journal. You're going to get original research and limited releases. And you'll get data products like our word of mouth index, which tracks how brands actually move through culture. Not vibes, not dashboards, but actual momentum. So you can see what's rising, what's peaking, and what's already on its way out.

30:22Plus members get priority access and preferred pricing for future commerce events, salons, and summits where ideas leave the group chat and enter the real world. Future Commerce Plus is for people who don't need more answers. They just need better ones. So join us today at futurecommerce.com slash plus and get vision for your business. futurecommerce.com slash plus. Join us today at futurecommerce.com slash plus. Now, let's get back to the show. It's so interesting. We've never had quite this paradigm in access to, you know, information, recommendation, relationship, and infrastructure, right?

31:13that is trying to pull off the same sort of switch from free access venture capital back to ad-supported revenue in the same way that we've always seen the switch to monetization happen in prior eras, right? But it does remind an old guy like me of things like net zero that has existed in the world where net zero back in the day had a similar infrastructure play And those things have never quite worked out very well. I think people tend to like to pay. No one likes to pay for anything. People tend to pay for infrastructure access to essential services. And so when people consider something essential in their lives, it becomes part of their main portion of their budget.

32:03And I think that an ad would be friction to the experience for them to have unfettered access and true access to the, you know, the, the, I would say the unfiltered recommendations that they would have otherwise received. And so potentially that's the real model there is everybody's on the$200 plan. I didn't pay$200 in a month for my cell phone, you know, 20 years ago and I do now. So maybe that's our future, Colin. Who knows? But that's not why you're here. But I, you know, I think that that's a really interesting dynamic in the consumer and it is something we tend to withstand over, you know, over decades.

32:48Um, I do think what's, what is interesting and something that, uh, could, uh, come about, um, as we, as we sort of move on, uh, I had this conversation in, in Ken, um, a few weeks ago. Uh, and this, this isn't something that, uh, necessarily you might be prepared to talk about, but I do think it's something that you're in the seat that, uh, I think you are best positioned to have the conversation around is there's more and more commerce media networks that seem to be emerging that are on sort of the financial services side of the house and the business. And they are more open to regulatory scrutiny and they have to live up to higher standards than other retail media networks that we might have seen in the past.

33:37Outside of potentially the largest retailers in the world who might have, you know, antitrust things they might have to skirt around from time to time. True banks have other problems and other issues to deal with. And a lot of the conversations I was hearing behind closed doors were how do these types of institutions ward off the potential regulatory issues by forming internal consortiums amongst other commerce media networks to self-regulate ahead of governmental bodies trying to regulate the industry as a whole. And I'm curious what the IAB might be thinking about as a potential, like you are in oversight of the industry.

34:25I think that's your job, right? So I'm curious what your perspective on that might be to hear that there are other, there's institutions who are also thinking about how they might be working internally amongst themselves to also be thinking about how do we self-regulate in this environment where they might be getting wind of other government agencies that might be thinking about now there's there's some consumer protections that might be coming down the pike yeah i mean i think self-regulation is a great place to start it doesn't it doesn't eliminate the scrutiny um automatically but i think it it does reduce um the eyeballs or, uh, sort of like focus on this particular part, um, of the industry.

35:13Now, obviously, as you said, you know, financial, financial institutions have such an opportunity because they see across, um, buying environments, obviously. And that, that really makes the, the, the, the data piece very attractive. Uh, the challenge obviously is what they can do with that data and where that data can go. And I think that is why a consortium is potentially really interesting because it does it rather than like saying, you know what, we're going to go on our own. We're going to create our own sort of set of standards and create our own commerce media network that's going to be a new paradigm.

35:53A consortium kind of allows for greater industry wide buy-in that I think is very much always looked upon, I think, favorably for the most part. I think one more, I don't know if we've mentioned the word yet, but like transparency kind of underpins all of our conversation so far. It probably is most important in this particular space because that, I mean, when it comes, I mean, it has to do with AI too. Like when a piece of content is advertised, is paid for, who's paying for the placement, if AI was used in that piece of media. I'd say that that is, regardless if we're talking about a consortium or a specific commerce media network, that is critical as a principle.

36:50There's obviously a lot of other things that are really important here when it comes to things like data governance in terms of where and what kind of customer data is being used and where is it being used. I think that that is obviously a piece here too. So there's a bevy of principles, I think, that need to kind of be kind of pillars of any sort of commerce media network that's in the financial services or any regulatory, highly regulated industry. And transparency and the governance piece are, to me, the two most important ones. And probably the ones that we focus on the most in a lot of our work.

37:32Yeah, I appreciate that. Yeah, our perspective is, obviously, these are signs of maturity in the ecosystem. I also think we're reaching a bit of tipping point to where, um, anything that's an impediment, um, to, uh, growth and maturity in the ecosystem as we, uh, as we do reach, I think, I, I thought we reached saturation a couple of years ago. I, I was wrong. Um, but you know, anything that does reach, uh, you know, does pose some sort of like a roadblock to growth. I do think probably doesn't bode well for the industry as a whole. And so I do like the thinking and I do want to continue to hear how folks are potentially thinking about working with, you know, institutions like yourself.

38:24I think that that's the right way to go. So, yeah, having more of these conversations, I think beyond closed doors and maybe more in public is probably the right move. But I digress. Alicia, I know that you have been covering Future Commerce quite a bit around retail and store experience and how a lot of this really extends this halo. I know we talk a lot about AI, but most of our beat is actually covering how online and offline are becoming much more blurred, too. What's your take on this here today?

39:01Collin Colburn: Yeah, I mean, I'm glad we kind of brought up other players coming into this ecosystem because it is getting more and more crowded. And I think the big question is, you know, for, you know, these retail media networks is how do we continue to compete and differentiate ourselves? And I think whether we're talking about financial institutions, whether we're talking about, you know, hospitality coming into the mix, even travel, the one thing that retail has is stores, right? It has a physical embodiment, a place where people can go to really feel and immerse themselves into a brand, not just have a quote unquote moment, right?

39:42Collin Colburn: And you've talked about making the store a more fun place through media. And I think that's the exciting point of evolution. We've always had point of purchase displays. We've always had end caps. But now we have these immersive digital screens where you can see recipes being done in motion. You can see influencer content. You can see ways to connect it with your mobile phone as you're going through the aisle. We're seeing some really fascinating movement with vertical dramas and how those are coming to life in store. So I guess to bring us home, let's dig into that value prop a little bit further.

40:26Collin Colburn: What does this current era of physical retail and media fusion kind of look like? And what are the opportunities for the future that you're starting to really see bubble up and really emerge as that differentiator that retail media networks need as they, you know, fight to stand out? Yeah. I mean, the opportunity for in-store retail media couldn't be bigger. And I think it's been on my radar since I got into the space 10 years ago because it's the greatest asset that a retailer has is their physical properties. And, you know, I often think about not only like we tend to talk about 99 % of the time within the store, which makes a lot of sense, right?

41:13Because of some of the things you talked about, making the store a more fun place, a more helpful place to find information, to find product that you might not have gone in thinking about or, you know, looking for. So I think that the opportunities are endless within the physical store. But then also, I would add, you know, outside of the store as well. A lot of these stores have the opportunity to run media on their exterior that also gets in front of potentially even more people than the physical in-store environment. So I think that the opportunities are certainly endless. You see a ton of growth in the space in terms of technology providers that are out there, retailers that are starting to scale their in-store media efforts.

42:06You also see a lot of non-endemic brands, so non-CBG, FMCG brands that are leaning into the space as well, simply because of the sheer number of people that still go to physical brick and mortar. Um, and you know, the data also shows that younger generations are just as interested, if not more interested in going into physical stores than generations like us. So, oh, it's, it's so wild too. Right. And I think that's the, the pendulum swinging back to you, to your, uh, point of, uh, you know, uh, the endemics and non-endemics. I feel like the, uh, uh, I was, there's the endemic digital native versus the non-endemic, you know, Gen X or, uh, but there's, uh, yeah, Alicia, I think you were about to jump in.

42:57Collin Colburn: Yeah. Yeah. I do have a quick follow-up question about that. I think it kind of brings us full circle, um, to your point about, you know, the non-endemic opportunity, like what are the implications as more brands outside of the four walls want to come into the store? Like, what does that mean culturally for brands and like how they manage those relationships with, um, you know, the companies that may be outside of the typical partnership parameter? Because I know I've had a few conversations with retail media folks of saying like, okay, we've had to like handle certain relationships with kid gloves, or we had to bring in certain people from outside of our division to determine like which brands outside of our typical partnerships we should bring in.

43:43Collin Colburn: So I'm curious, like, are there any standards around that or overarching approaches that ensure that that side of the business is growing, right? Because that's the goal to bring in as many advertisers as you can without inhibiting or damaging the retailer experience, but also those relationships with brands, right? Because that probably gets a little tricky. It gets hairy really quick. And you see a lot of retailers kind of cautious with, you know, they're like optimistically cautious about the non-endemic opportunity because there are so many that are knocking on their door. But when push comes to shove, it is not as seamless as what I just sounded like three minutes ago.

44:31And it comes down to both the retailer and brand relationship, like you mentioned, and also that customer experience in the store. Because the retailer asking themselves, does my customer, if I'm a grocer, does my customer actually want to see a Geico ad running at the point of sale? And it's a good question. And then it comes down to reach and frequency too of, well, how often do they want to see it? Like if it's flashing nonstop and I see it multiple times within my, I don't know, 15, 20 minutes of being in the store, that's probably not a great experience for that consumer. So you see a lot of retailers that are taking advantage of the opportunity and then they very quickly go, oh, actually, we're going to put some really tight caps on the frequency management, for instance.

45:31And then that's a tough song and dance for the advertiser because they're like, well, The whole point of being here is because of all the people that are in the store. So it's a balance that is very much in the works of being struck. And I don't think anyone has done it. I mean, no one has perfected it yet. So there aren't exactly standards that exist in this yet, but something that I think down the line we'll be looking more closely at. Yeah.

46:03Collin Colburn: It goes to your earlier point about how it really needs to be holistic and, you know, several players really need to come into the mix to make sure that all the touch points orchestrate well, whether it's, you know, a digital interface or something happening in the store. So it really shows that evolution firsthand. That's the, and then I think to our original point earlier this year around predictions and in our, I'd say, is gambling economy the wrong word to use? But I think we're like verging on a gambling economy right now. Anyone will take almost any brand placement around a sweepstakes. Like I think we've already figured that out.

46:45And that's, we have a partner that we work with, Colin, who has had tremendous success at like a Home Depot. If you are giving away a Ford F-150, like, it doesn't matter. Like, people love that. They're all about that. Um, so, but, uh, I, I do think that there's, there is a ton of, uh, opportunity there that, yeah, retailers are probably, uh, they're probably, uh, really highly experimental depending on the integration and the brand. Um, and there is a lot of, yeah, there's cautious optimism. We could probably talk for hours on this particular subject. Uh, where can folks, uh, hear more from you?

47:25I think you're doing a ton of thought leadership. Uh, IAB puts out a ton. And Colin, where can they get more from you straight from where you're publishing? IAB.com. You don't have to be a member. Anyone can create a login to access much of our thought leadership and much of our work. You can find all the work from myself and my center of excellence there. So very much encourage you to go there. We also have, we do lots of events throughout the year. um my my event connected commerce summit is every april um so we're a little bit a ways from there um but we do lots of other uh events as well around creators around um podcasting audio you name it um so uh look look for us uh with some of our events as well yeah uh maybe we can uh twist your arm one of these days to get out to our summit at visions uh we have one coming up november 3rd.

48:19As a reminder to our audience, November 3rd at the MoMA. And we are talking about the impact that AI is having right now on both culture and commerce. So go to futurecommerce.com to learn more about that. But we are just so thrilled to have had you. We'll link up all of the resources that we talked about here in the description in the show notes. So wherever you're watching and listening from, go check it out. Colin Colburn, thank you for joining us here on this episode of future commerce you find more episodes of this podcast wherever you uh find your podcast and if this conversation sparked something for you like follow subscribe wherever you get your media these days helps more people join in the conversation if you want more future commerce in your world i'm reaching down here you can find our print shop futurecommerce.com where you get books like this it's called lore um and this isn't even our most recent one we have five or six books just like this today helps bring beautifully crafted journals print scenes and collectibles into your world.

49:14Atoms, they last a lot longer than electrons in your inbox these days. Remember, commerce shapes the future because commerce is culture. We'll see you next time.