Marketing

From chaos to clarity: How CPG brands can harness commerce media for full funnel growth

Despite today’s fragmented retail landscape and the challenges, commerce media’s movement up the funnel is a tremendous opportunity. Never before has the scale of first party retailer data been available for use in these channels.

Photo: Adobe Stock

September 16, 2025 by Skye Frontier — Executive Vice President, Incremental

One of the most notable trends in advertising today is commerce media's shift from search to "full-funnel" media.

Commerce media's 2.0 incarnation moves from a predominant focus on search up the funnel to off-site display, online video and connected TV. For retailers that have monetized everything on their websites, they have looked beyond the digital shelves of their marketplaces to expand their ad inventory.

For advertisers, this means an unlock of rich first party data in new channels but they can't just lift the playbook from search and apply here.

For commerce media teams coming out of shopper marketing, search or performance media, there are real learnings that need to be applied to make effective use of these new channels.

Here are five learnings we see high performing CPGs apply as they begin to approach these upper funnel capabilities.

1. Emphasize creative quality

For 15-30 second video ads, approximately 40% to 70% of an ad's effect is attributed to the quality of the creative. Developing quality creative for these formats lead times for both research and development. Rushing through that development process and launching a sub-optimal creative can singlehandly tank the performance of the campaign.

What brands can do: Don't underinvest in creativity. Collaborate closely with brand marketing teams, as they likely already have well-established creative assets and testing or research tools that you can reformat and repurpose for your use. Take the time to conduct research, whether that involves pre-testing the creative or doing in-market tracking research.

2. Demand transparency into inventory sources

The moment you discuss off-site media, you must ask questions about where that inventory is displayed. Is it inventory owned and operated by the retailer or is it open web? Is the media brand safe, fraud-free, and viewable? Advertisers' brands must bring all of these considerations to the forefront.

What CPG brands can do: Ask those hard questions. If you are buying off-site, ask where the inventory is coming from — open web, allowlist, blocklist? Are you paying for all impressions or just viewable? If its video, is the ad-unit skippable or so, after how long?

3. Rethink how—and who—you target

Transitioning from search to full-funnel marketing means shifting from keywords to audiences. Effective search is about making your product digitally available to someone with high intent to buy it right now. Upper funnel marketing operates on the almost exact opposite paradigm — the whole point is to reach a consumer that is not going to buy today or even tomorrow. Instead, full-funnel marketers must work to consistently build associations over time, making their brand top of mind so that when consumers are in the market to buy, there's a strong association with them and they are primed to buy their brand over another. Really effective brand marketing builds these associations around key entry occasions for the category that prompt purchase - think of a beer on a beach and it's pretty hard to not be prompted with Corona.

What CPG brands can do: To do this you want to reach consumers, not shoppers. While audiences like retargeting past buyers, or recent product searchers may seem tempting, these high intent audiences are likely already about to purchase. Similarly, the audience size is often relatively small, so increasing investment behind them tends to rack up greater frequency instead of net new reach. Effective upper funnel targeting is about broad reach, with an emphasis on reach over frequency. Examples can be as broad as all category buyers or lifestyle segments derived from search and shopping behavior.

4. Coordination and cross-pollination of teams

Teams are often divided across the funnel or by budget source — trade marketing vs. brand marketing, performance vs. shopper, etc. making coordination difficult and the sharing of best practices challenging. This in turns leads to a fragmented and inconsistent consumer experience with different messaging, creative, or highlighted products being used.

What CPG brands can do: Encourage coordination and cross training. There are numerous online courses, content, and conversations with industry peers that can help marketers become more fluent in each of these areas enabling deeper conversations and coordination between the teams.

5. Measure across the funnel

Campaigns closer to the sales are often easier to measure — direct tracking is easier and the user is less likely to convert in an outside channel. The further away you move from the point of purchase the harder the measurement becomes. This becomes even more biased when last touch attribution leads to lower funnel touches stealing credit from those up funnel. This can rapidly lead to an over-investment in lower funnel efforts.

What CPG brands can do: Move away from siloed last touch attribution towards an incrementality based approach that can be applied across the entire funnel. Approaches like designed experimentation or econometrics are great tools for getting a broad and consistent view of performance.

Taking advantage of commerce media 2.0

Despite today's fragmented retail landscape and the challenges, commerce media's movement up the funnel is a tremendous opportunity. Never before has the scale of 1st party retailer data been available for use in these channels.

About Skye Frontier

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Skye is a go-to-market leader with 15 years of background in advertising effectiveness and brand strategy. He has spent his career helping brands use predictive analytics to guide how they deploy marketing resources to grow their brands. Prior to Incremental, he held roles at BERA, Neustar, and comScore leading brand strategy, marketing science, and media measurement.

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