Why commerce media is at a critical inflection point in 2026

What comes next, he says, is not incremental change but a genuine inflection point – one where commerce media either becomes a fully integrated part of brand marketing, or repeats the same mistakes the industry has made every time a new channel arrives with too much money and too little discipline.

Fantazier knows both sides of the argument. Before joining The Trade Desk, he spent nearly two decades at Johnson & Johnson and later Kenvue, most recently helping to bring retail media and brand media together inside integrated media teams. It was there, he says, that the scale of the problem – and the opportunity – became impossible to ignore.

“The retail media part of the pie grew so fast and so significantly that we had to treat it as part of the media mix,” he says. “And what I found was that while there was a huge amount of opportunity, there was also a huge amount of waste.”

That tension sits at the heart of commerce media’s current moment. The infrastructure largely exists. The data is there. The inventory is there. What’s been missing, Fantazier argues, is intent.

“We’re right at the point now where the question isn’t what’s possible,” he says. “It’s: what do you actually do with it?”

For too long, retail media has been treated as a bolt-on – useful, tactical, but separate from the rest of marketing. Budgets were justified because a retailer had data, not because that data was being used with purpose. Fantazier believes that model has reached its limit.

“If you don’t have an objective – an insight that explains why you’re talking to someone in a particular way – you’re just buying access, not effectiveness,” he says.

The opportunity, as he sees it, is to move beyond the language of ‘retail media’ altogether. Not because retail data becomes less important, but because it becomes foundational – another signal inside a broader communications plan rather than a channel fighting for carve-outs.

That shift matters for consumers as much as it does for brands. Fantazier is blunt about the risk of getting this wrong.

“Advertising is inherently an interruption,” he says. “If it’s noisy, confusing, or uncoordinated, it’s bad for the consumer and bad for the brand.”

Used properly, retail data should do the opposite – reducing friction, increasing relevance and helping people make better decisions rather than bombarding them with more messages.

Where Fantasier sees the biggest upside is in how retail data can reshape brand building itself. The industry has spent the last year arguing – often noisily – about whether commerce media can support upper-funnel objectives. His view is that the question is now outdated.

“This is about insight-led brand building,” he says. “Understanding how people actually behave – whether they’re innovation seekers, stock-up shoppers, or infrequent buyers with high baskets – and speaking to them in a way that reflects that.”

Not hyper-personalization. Not endless creative permutations. Just smarter segmentation, informed by behavior rather than blunt demographics.

AI, inevitably, looms over all of this – but Fantazier is wary of both panic and blind acceleration. The real risk, he says, is not moving carefully enough.

“If you move too fast without standards or guardrails, you end up with unintended consequences – financial waste, bad experiences or AI slop,” he says.

For Fantazier, AI’s most valuable role today is as an assistant rather than an autopilot – helping marketers navigate complexity, surface better options and make sense of a system that has become too large to manage manually.

The same pragmatism underpins his view of creativity. AI can help adapt, version and scale ideas. It cannot replace the human spark that makes those ideas worth scaling in the first place.

Perhaps the most consequential impact of this inflection point, however, is happening higher up the organisation.

Fantazier believes data transparency is finally shifting the marketer’s position in the C-suite – not because uncertainty has disappeared, but because confidence has increased.

“Marketing will always involve unknowns,” he says. “That doesn’t change. What does change is the ability to say: I know who I’m talking to, I know where I’m reaching them, and I can show what it’s doing.”

That changes conversations with finance, with commercial leadership and with boards that have historically been sceptical of marketing spend. As commerce media matures, accountability rises with it.

Which is why Fantazier thinks 2026 will feel less like evolution and more like upheaval.

“The easy money is gone,” he says. “Trade dollars have largely been tapped out. Now retail media networks must compete for brand budgets – and that means interoperability, partnership and proof.”

The danger, he adds, is that the industry avoids the harder conversations. Measurement, outcomes and effectiveness still lag behind the noise.

“There’s been a lot of talk about what’s possible,” he says. “Not enough about what’s actually working.”

That, ultimately, is the inflection point Fantazier sees. Commerce media is big enough now that it can no longer hide behind growth. What happens next will determine whether it becomes a durable part of modern marketing – or just the next overbuilt system waiting to be stripped back.