What exactly is Commerce Media?

Depending on which industry report you read, India's fast-growing commerce-led advertising economy can look very different.

The Dentsu-e4m report 2026 says advertising on e-retail platforms reached ₹17,601 crore in 2025. Pitch Madison Advertising Report 2026 puts quick-commerce advertising alone at ₹4,000 crore last year and expects it to reach ₹6,000 crore in 2026. WPP Media’s latest mid-year forecast, meanwhile, places the broader commerce-media market at around ₹34,700 crore this year.

The problem isn't the numbers. It is the nouns.

Retail media. E-retail. Quick-commerce advertising. Commerce media. As advertising follows transactions beyond Amazon and Flipkart into Blinkit, Swiggy, travel, mobility and financial services, an industry usually quite talented at inventing terminology has arrived at another one: commerce media.

What it hasn't quite settled is what the term actually means.

The distinction is becoming more relevant as commerce-linked advertising takes a larger share of budgets. Different reports measure different parts of what increasingly looks like the same broader advertising economy.

Retail media, but wider

The clearest point of agreement among industry executives is that commerce media is broader than retail media.

“Retail media uses a retailer’s shopper and transaction data to activate media across its own digital inventory as well as offsite environments,” says Ritika Taneja, Sr VP, E-commerce Strategy, WPP Media India.

Commerce media, she says, provides the wider frame: advertising activated using purchase or commerce-intent data and evaluated against a business outcome. “Retail media is one strong expression of commerce media, but not its outer boundary.”

That distinction becomes important once the advertising business moves beyond retailers.

Read more on retail media evolution 

Meher Patel, Founder of Hector (a Wondrlab company), says travel companies, food-delivery platforms, financial-services businesses and other consumer platforms can all potentially operate commerce-media businesses if they can use commerce data to make advertising relevant and measurable.

Retail media, then, is relatively easy to identify. Amazon, Flipkart or a quick-commerce marketplace possesses shopper information, inventory and the transaction itself.

Commerce media potentially stretches further. A travel platform has booking data. A food-delivery app has ordering behaviour. A financial platform may possess signals around spending and transactions.

But owning those signals alone does not make each of them a commerce-media company.

Data isn't enough

This is where the definitions begin to converge.

First-party data is hardly unique to commerce. Publishers, streaming services, banks and practically every logged-in digital service possess some form of information about their users.

Saheb Singh, Director - Strategy, AGENCY09, argues that transactional data alone does not qualify a business as a commerce media platform. “A business needs the ability to turn that data into privacy-safe audience intelligence, activate media against it and measure the resulting commercial impact.”

He adds that commerce media need not always drive an immediate conversion. It can support brand-building too, provided the platform can still connect exposure to downstream behaviour.

The distinction, executives argue, is the relationship between that information and commercial behaviour.

Patel gives the example of a publisher knowing that a user frequently consumes automotive content. It can use that information to serve car advertising, but that remains first-party-data targeting unless the signals are derived from, or connected to, actual shopping and purchase behaviour.

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Sini Magon, COO and Global Partner at Grapes Worldwide, similarly says transaction data by itself is insufficient. “It should also be able to show whether an ad actually led to a purchase or another meaningful business result. That ability to connect media spend with real outcomes is what gives commerce media its value,” she says.

Yasin Hamidani, Director, Media Care Brand Solutions, describes the proposition as a combination of audience intelligence, transaction intent and closed-loop measurement. Retail media, in his definition, sits within commerce media as the retailer-owned subset.

In other words, what separates commerce media from conventional targeted advertising may be less about where an ad appears than whether the platform can connect the signal, the exposure and the eventual commercial result.

Show me the receipt

There are still disagreements around the edges.

Russhabh R Thakkar, Founder and CEO of Frodoh, draws part of the distinction around reach. Retail media, in his definition, largely operates inside one ecosystem, while commerce media can use transactional intelligence to follow consumers across environments.

Taneja's definition makes that boundary less clear-cut. She notes that retail media itself increasingly extends offsite into social platforms, open-web inventory and CTV.

That suggests the location of the ad is unlikely to provide the final definition.

Measurement may.

Thakkar argues that a credible commerce-media proposition requires transactional intelligence, the ability to activate it at relevant moments and closed-loop attribution.

Read more on media measurement 

“If you cannot draw a clean line from an ad exposure to a verified commercial outcome, whether that is a website visit, a purchase, or a store walk-in, then you are not doing commerce media. You are doing expensive digital advertising with better targeting,” he says.

Even here there are degrees of maturity.

Taneja draws a distinction between attribution, establishing that an exposed consumer subsequently converted, and incrementality, establishing that the advertising actually caused a sale that would otherwise not have occurred.

“The credible floor is closed-loop attribution,” she says, while incrementality is the harder standard platforms should eventually move towards.

Her shorthand is perhaps the neatest definition of where the category currently stands: “Attribution is the entry ticket; incrementality is the maturity test.”

That may also explain why estimates of the market remain so different.

Dentsu-e4m measures e-retail. Pitch Madison separates retail and e-commerce from quick commerce. WPP Media measures a broader retail-media universe. Commerce media potentially adds still more businesses whose advertising propositions are connected to transactions without necessarily being retailers.

The category can therefore become very large, very quickly.

But stretch it too far and the term stops being useful. Any platform with first-party data and an ad product could theoretically claim a place in it.

For now, the industry's emerging threshold appears narrower: commerce signals that can be activated as media, coupled with the ability to connect that media to a measurable business outcome.

Or, in Thakkar's rather simpler formulation, advertisers should ask platforms to “show me the receipt.”