As upfronts begin, commerce media is set to surpass TV ad spend

The upfronts have long been TV’s moment to dominate the conversation. This year, they arrive as commerce media is about to surpass it in ad spend. That’s according to projections from agency holding company WPP.

The shift is more than symbolic. For decades, TV has been the most prestigious — and most valuable — channel in advertising. But its dominance is no longer a given. Commerce media, fueled by first-party data and outcome-based measurement, is reshaping how marketers allocate budgets and define success.

Buyers now expect all their media, including TV, to prove its value in terms of measurable outcomes. That expectation has propelled commerce media’s rise.

The surge in commerce

Worldwide spending on commerce ads, broadly defined as advertising informed by consumers’ first-party shopping data, has surged because it aligns with that demand. It reaches consumers close to the point of purchase and can tie exposure directly to sales.

It’s also becoming much easier for brands to execute such campaigns.

Just five years ago, activating audiences on Walmart was “a pain in the ass,” according to Kevin Simonson, CEO of performance marketing agency adMixt. “It was a walled garden just five years ago,” he said.

Brands once needed intermediaries just to transact. Today, with broader platform access and DSP integrations, the barrier to entry is much lower.

At the same time, the industry has embraced performance metrics as its primary lens.

Elizabeth Marsten, vice president of commerce media at performance agency Tinuiti, credits the rise of commerce to the industry-wide push to measure campaigns in terms of sales performance.

“There is an obsession with incrementality,” Marsten said.

Because retail and commerce campaigns pull a customer’s purchase data, they lend themselves to metrics like return on advertising spend (ROAS) and sales lift, making them easier to justify and scale.

The measurement trap

But the clarity of those metrics is often overstated.

Some analysts argue that ROAS, in particular, can create a false sense of precision by rewarding platforms for capturing demand that already exists.

“ROAS bears little-to-no correlation with incrementality,” said Andrew Lipsman, a longtime analyst at Comscore and EMarketer, who now runs his own consultancy Media, Ads + Commerce. “It’s ROAS that’s the fool’s gold, not retail media itself.”

In other words, the issue isn’t commerce media as a channel — it’s how success is defined within it.

Incrementality, often positioned as the corrective, is hardly straightforward. Definitions vary widely across platforms, and methodologies differ in ways that make comparisons difficult.

“The problem I have with incremental sales is, incremental to what? The brand? The store? The category? The SKU?” Marsten said. “Everybody measures incrementality a little bit differently depending on the platform and how far they look back.”

Marsten points to “new-to-brand” as a more useful signal — especially for mature brands where awareness is already saturated.

“Oreo doesn’t have an awareness problem, it has a consideration problem on the shelf. How does Oreo kick you off the competitor and to its brand?”

In other words, the real question isn’t just whether an ad drove a sale, but whether it changed a decision. That distinction is harder to measure — and easy to miss in performance metrics built for attribution, not influence.

Don’t count out TV

That limitation reframes TV’s role rather than diminishes it.

Television’s strength has always been its ability to build brands at scale — something that doesn’t map neatly to short-term performance metrics but remains critical to sustained growth.

As connected TV (CTV) evolves, it is beginning to adopt some of the capabilities that have fueled commerce media’s rise. Pinterest and Meta are both expanding into CTV, bringing their identity graphs to the channel, enabling more precise targeting across CTV environments. These new capabilities will make CTV even more measurable.

Some see this convergence as the emergence of “performance TV.”

“As performance TV emerges, the industry is going to need to learn how to speak the language of brand-building and performance simultaneously,” Lipsman said.

Still, there are limits.

CTV will never be as measurable as retail and commerce, according to Simonson, but, he said, it will improve and hold a vital spot in the marketing mix.

“A mature brand that is mindful toward measurement will expand into CTV knowing that it sits at the top and middle funnel, and that Meta and Google will clean up at the bottom,” he added.

In short, the future won’t belong to commerce media or TV alone, but to strategies that connect the two — balancing immediate returns with long-term growth.