As part of The Drum’s Commerce Media Month, we caught up with Yahoo’s Beth Gross at CES 2026 to talk about why the industry’s biggest problem isn’t technology – it’s how brands, retailers and agencies are still organized.
Beth Gross
CES has a habit of exaggerating the future. Big robots. Bigger screens. Bigger promises. But when we caught up with Beth Gross, head of commerce media at Yahoo, the conversation kept circling back to something far more mundane – and far more problematic. Structure.
“This planning and operating in silos,” she says, “that’s what has to change.”
Gross has seen the commerce media evolution from just about every angle that matters. She started her career deep inside retail, working on private label and loyalty at Safeway, before moving through brand-side shopper marketing, agency leadership and, eventually, adtech. It’s why she can speak fluently to retailers, brands and platforms – and why she’s increasingly blunt about where things are breaking down.
“The shopper doesn’t care where the budget comes from,” she says. “That’s what I keep telling people. The shopper does not care.”
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At CES, the presence of retailers is no longer surprising, but Gross remembers when it would have seemed absurd.
“If you’d told me 20 years ago that Safeway, Albertsons or Kroger would have a suite at CES, I’d have said, ‘This is insane. How does this make sense? This is a technology show.’”
The answer, of course, is media. Retailers aren’t just selling groceries or hardware any more; they’re standing up media businesses. And that shift, Gross argues, is why the industry has moved on from talking about “retail media” alone.
“That’s why commerce media has become the umbrella term. Because you can’t just call it retail media any more. You’re not going to Marriott to buy a box of cornflakes.”
Airlines, travel brands, marketplaces and platforms with transactional relationships are all building media propositions. What links them isn’t shelves or stores – it’s data, identity and outcomes.
“Commerce media isn’t really different media,” Gross says. “It’s just media that happens to be run by a retailer – or a business with transaction-level insight.”
For Gross, the biggest threat to commerce media isn’t the fragmentation of platforms. It’s the fragmentation of people.
“We still see, ‘Here’s my CTV budget. Here’s my out-of-home budget. Here’s my display budget.’ That just isn’t sustainable.”
What should replace it is far less glamorous but far more effective. “Get everybody in the room up front,” she says. “You can’t have a separate digital conversation, a separate shopper conversation, a separate merchant conversation.”
That includes agreeing on measurement before a single dollar is spent. “Agree on ROAS. Agree on incrementality. Agree on how it’s measured. Otherwise, how do you evaluate success? How do you justify reinvestment?”
The tension is particularly acute for retailers, who now find themselves in a complicated dual role. “I need my product on the shelf,” Gross says, “but now I also need you to buy my media.”
Without common measurement standards, she argues, that relationship becomes unsustainable – and increasingly mistrusted. “You’re grading your own homework sometimes. There has to be commonality on measurement. Otherwise, how are you comparing investments?”
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Yahoo’s role in this ecosystem, Gross explains, is less about owning inventory and more about unifying access. “Our reason for being is allowing advertisers to tap into all these different networks without having to log into 10 different places.”
Crucially, Yahoo brings something many newer players don’t: a large, consent-based identity graph built from its publishing businesses. “People come to us for mail, finance, sports, news. That underpins our identity graph. It’s permission-based and deterministic.”
That data, combined with retail partnerships, allows advertisers to plan and measure across on-site and off-site environments – including categories where endemic retail media access is limited.
“You might not be able to get Walmart data,” Gross says, “but we can help you mine purchase behavior through other signals and go after those audiences.”
The aim, she stresses, is flexibility – not lock-in. “Bring your own data. Bring your own agents. We’ll meet you where you are. If you win, we win. You come back and use the platform again.”
If CES 2025 was about AI theory, CES 2026 is about application – and Gross believes agentic tools will accelerate commerce media adoption rather than complicate it.
“This is about taking away the day-to-day, task-oriented work so people can focus on strategy,” she says.
Yahoo has already launched several agents designed to speed up planning, audience building and optimisation – work that previously took weeks.
“You can build an entire audience segment off Yahoo Mail data in about 30 seconds,” she says. “That used to take an enormous amount of manual effort.”
The bigger risk, she warns, is inaction. “You’re talking months, not years. This can’t happen next year. It has to happen now.”
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For Gross, commerce media’s future isn’t about replacing media as we know it; it’s about forcing it to grow up.
“Commerce media already is media. It just comes with better insight, better attribution and better outcomes.”
The winners won’t be the platforms shouting the loudest at CES. They’ll be the brands, retailers and agencies willing to reorganize around the shopper – not the org chart.
And that, as ever, is the hardest innovation of all.
Commerce media is moving fast. The Drum Awards for Commerce Media are here to recognize the work keeping pace – and setting the standard. Join us in Miami in April as part of The Drum’s year-round Commerce Media program. Learn more and enter.
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