Media and Commerce: The Latest Digital Transformations

By Laurence Milhau, Executive Director Client Operations & Digital Transformation at WPP Media

The year 2025 marked a pivotal moment in the digital ecosystem. It was not merely a time of incremental adjustments but a period of profound disruptions that fundamentally altered the balance of power among market players.

Advertising investments in “Commerce Media” surpassed those in television, content creators emerged as true media powerhouses, and the fusion of data with Artificial Intelligence (AI) accelerated an unprecedented shift in dynamics.

For WPP Media, understanding these transformations is crucial to crafting winning strategies for 2026.

The Three Major Transformations of 2025

Commerce at the Center: Transaction, the New Heart of Marketing

• An Economic Shift: In 2025, Commerce Media became the new epicenter of global advertising investments, overtaking television. The transaction is no longer the endpoint but has become the core of the marketing process, with Retail Media taking center stage.

• “Commerce Engine” Platforms: Titans like Meta, TikTok, and Amazon have intensified their focus on integrating commerce, seamlessly converting intent into action within their platforms. For brands, the challenge now lies in delivering a consistent and high-performing shopping experience across a multitude of touchpoints.

• The End of the Linear Funnel: WPP’s How Humans Decide study revealed that 84% of purchase decisions are influenced by “pre-existing brand preference” (Brand Priming). As a result, marketing efforts must prioritize cultivating this preference early in the customer journey, well before the point of conversion.

Go Further: Jérémy Hoy: “ROAS is a simple metric, but dangerously reductive.”

Audience Fragmentation: Scattered Content, Complicated Measurement

• A Dispersed Video Landscape: The dominance of linear TV is giving way to streaming platforms and fragmented content. Advertising budgets have followed audiences to these new channels, requiring precise coordination to effectively reach consumers.

• The Rise of Creators: Content creators have solidified their position as media powerhouses, producing events that rival traditional media in both audience size and value. They have become a critical driver of conversions, embodying trust and providing social proof.

• The Challenge of Video Measurement: This hyper-fragmentation has made measuring video performance extraordinarily complex. The central question of 2025 was: “What is the real and deduplicated reach of my campaign across all these touchpoints?” Médiamétrie has responded with its new TV & Video Watch household audience measurement, which integrates data from platforms like YouTube, Netflix, and Amazon.

Data and AI: Accelerators of the Power Imbalance

• AI, a Weapon of Concentration: By 2025, AI and data had evolved from mere optimization tools into the foundations of a new power dynamic. Major platforms have benefited from a virtuous cycle (more data = better AI = more users = more data), further consolidating their dominance.

• The Cookieless Shift and “Walled Gardens”: The strategic consolidation of “walled gardens” has been a win for platforms managing billions of first-party signals. In contrast, the complexity of targeting on the Open Web has made these closed ecosystems attractive to advertisers, offering stable and high-performing solutions.

• The Threat of Disintermediation: AI has also driven greater disintermediation, particularly through Large Language Models (LLMs) and tools like Google’s “AI Overviews” (not yet available in France due to regulatory constraints). These tools intercept the customer journey, reducing visibility into user behaviors and intentions. Automated solutions like Performance Max and Advantage+ have shifted much of the campaign optimization process to platform algorithms, diminishing advertisers’ direct control and increasing their reliance on these systems.

WPP Media: Orchestrating Complexity for 2026

In response to these shifts, the ecosystem is working to reinvent audience targeting in a post-cookie world through methods like contextual targeting and data clean rooms, while also striving to regain control over performance measurement. Enhanced by AI, Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) 2.0 is emerging as a strategic cornerstone, complemented by tactical studies.

For 2026, success will not hinge on mastering a single lever but on the ability to orchestrate cohesive and high-performing experiences in a hybrid, ever-evolving, and complex environment. Value creation no longer comes from merely adding more levers but from seamlessly integrating them.

With its comprehensive expertise, innovative solutions like the Open Media Studio platform, and its DPAM process (Discover-Plan-Activate-Measure), WPP Media is uniquely positioned to guide brands through this new era. By intrinsically connecting commerce, content, and intelligence, we aim to master this complexity, delivering sustainable and measurable growth.

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