Shoppable ads, in-store retail media, and AI-driven agentic commerce are all being hailed as game-changers for the next wave of commerce media. But which trends are ready to deliver and which ones still have more buzz than business impact?

At a recent EMARKETER event, analysts Blake Droesch and Sarah Marzano squared off in a lively, three-round debate to separate the hype from reality. Here’s how each round played out.

1. The evolution of shoppable media

The hype: With shoppable media, consumer behavior and platform capabilities are finally aligned, making every ad a potential storefront.

• Over a third (38%) of US ad buyers said they would focus more on shoppable ads this year, according to December 2024 data from the IAB.
• In addition, 35.2% of digital buyers in the US will make a shoppable media purchase this year, according to EMARKETER’s forecast.

The reality: Momentum is real, but mass adoption isn’t here yet.

• Retailers and media partners are pushing shoppable formats, but consumers aren’t universally engaging with them yet.
• However, there are some situations where shoppable formats could work, like social commerce, according to Droesch’s “Shoppable Media 2025” report.
• This means brands should experiment with shoppable media, but tread lightly with untested formats. As they allocate budget toward shoppable ads, marketers should effectively scale ROI or prepare to shift dollars to different formats.

2. The rise of in-store retail media

The hype: Fans of in-store retail media see a huge opportunity to tap into CPG trade budgets and bring that spend into digital channels.

• “There's a past precedent for this, because when online retail media first came into existence, the way that ad buyers funded those ad buys was by pulling it from existing budgets,” said Marzano.

The reality: Infrastructure and fragmentation are major obstacles.

• In-store retail media currently accounts for less than 1% of total spend and isn’t expected to surpass $1 billion until 2029, according to Marzano’s “In-Store Retail Media Report 2025.”
• “What needs to happen is that retailers need to better knit together their media and merchants and category teams to ensure that they're creating like one endpoint for those dollars to flow into in order to do the most effective thing with it,” said Marzano.

3. The emergence of agentic commerce

The hype: The promise of agentic commerce imagines a world where autonomous AI agents make shopping decisions for consumers, understanding their needs, comparing prices, and checking out automatically.

“If there was an agent that could effectively understand what someone needed to purchase and why they needed to purchase it, and the person the consumer understood that this agent was acting in their best interest, then, yes, that would emerge as a real, viable channel in ecommerce,” said Droesch.

The reality: AI will assist, not replace, the shopping journey, according to our “Why AI Shopping Assistants Won’t Drive an Immediate Shift to Ecommerce” report.

• “AI and genAI assistance are going to become key players in things like research and discovery and consideration,” said Marzano.
• This means retailers will need to think about how they partner with these services.

The likely scenario is gradual integration. AI tools that guide consumers toward products and streamline discovery, rather than replacing decision-making entirely.