At Cannes Lions this year, P&G Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard named three shifts reshaping advertising all at once: media and content fragmentation, media and commerce convergence, and the AI turbocharge. None of them are new observations on their own. What’s new is that CMOs now have to manage all three simultaneously, with a funnel model that was never built for the job.
The traditional funnel mapped a customer’s journey in order: awareness, discovery, consideration, purchase, loyalty. That journey still happens. It just doesn’t happen in order anymore, and it rarely happens in a single channel. Discovery, research, and purchase now converge inside a single scrolling session, and increasingly inside a single platform.
Pacvue teamed up with retail media analyst Andrew Lipsman to unpack what comes next in The CMO’s Guide to the Future of Commerce Media, and the short version is this: the funnel isn’t getting an upgrade. It’s being replaced by a different shape entirely.
Three Shifts, One Collision
Fragmentation is easy to see. There are more channels, more formats, and more platforms competing for the same media dollars than at any point in the industry’s history. Convergence is where it gets more interesting: retail media is the clearest example of media and commerce merging into one motion, but social commerce and agentic commerce are pulling in the same direction. And the AI turbocharge means brands can now produce and target creative at a scale that would have been unthinkable two years ago, even if AI still can’t replace the marketing fundamentals underneath it.
Put those three shifts together and the result isn’t a faster funnel. It’s a grid, where every channel and every touchpoint has to be evaluated on both brand-building and performance at the same time.
Ad Dollars Already Know Where This Is Going
Marketers don’t need convincing that convergent channels matter. The spend is already moving. Performance TV, social media, retail media, social commerce, and creator content are the fastest-growing categories in the ad market today, according to EMARKETER, precisely because they sit at the intersection of media and commerce.
The problem is that most organizations still can’t see that intersection clearly. Per the IAB, 50% of marketers say commerce media is underrepresented in their marketing mix models, and 48% say the same about creator and influencer marketing. These are the channels driving the fastest growth, and they’re also the channels most likely to be invisible in the models that decide next year’s budget.
That gap shows up in the numbers CMOs are forced to defend. Ad spend allocated to performance media jumped from 59% in 2023 to 70% in 2025, per Deloitte and the American Marketing Association’s CMO Survey, even though CMOs themselves prefer something closer to a 53/47 split between branding and performance. When the CFO is the loudest voice in the budget conversation and the measurement model can’t account for long-term brand effects, performance media wins by default, whether or not it’s the right call.
The Silo Tax Is Already Eating Your EBIT
Underneath the measurement gap is an organizational one. Media teams optimize for ROAS. Trade teams optimize for GMV. Inventory teams optimize for supply chain efficiency. Finance wants all three to add up to the same number, and they rarely do. Pacvue calls this compounding inefficiency the Silo Tax: promos that wreck ad ROI and train shoppers to wait for deals, ad spend that keeps firing on out-of-stock SKUs, and a P&L that only shows the damage a month after every decision has already been made.
DATAVERSITY’s 2024 trends survey found that 68% of organizations cite data silos as a top concern, up 7 points year over year, and 46% report it’s actively hurting their ability to meet customer needs.
Standardization Is the Real Unlock
Retail media fragmentation alone has become its own management problem. McKinsey found that the share of advertisers running five or more retail media networks jumped from 38% in 2023 to 65% in 2025, and the share running nine or more nearly quadrupled, from 8% to 33%. The top challenge advertisers cite in retail media measurement is integrating results across channels and platforms. The second is a lack of consistent metrics between networks.
That’s exactly the gap the Commerce Grid is built to close: a standardized, platform-agnostic way to plan, buy, measure, and optimize across every channel, so that a video view on TikTok and a sponsored search click on Amazon can be evaluated on the same terms, tied to the same outcome.
What This Means for Your 2027 Plan
The brands that win next year won’t be the ones with the most touchpoints. They’ll be the ones with the fewest gaps between their operational layer, their measurement, and their team structure. As Danny Silverman of Market Performance Group puts it, “budgets keep defending the org chart instead of following the shopper” until incrementality is measured consistently across the whole ecosystem.
Before locking a 2027 media plan, every CMO should be able to answer a few uncomfortable questions: Is your measurement actually unified, or is every team still reporting its own version of “performance”? Can you trace results back to a shared base, down to the SKU? And is your org rewarding isolated wins like a strong ROAS, or holding every function accountable to the number that actually matters?
The full guide digs into all of it: the data behind the collapsing funnel, the three-layer blueprint for eliminating the Silo Tax, and the framework Pacvue Prism is built around to connect every channel, ad type, and journey stage to real business outcomes. Download it here.
