The path to purchase hasn’t just shortened — it’s splintered. As AI fragments where consumer intent forms, retail media must reckon with what it’s actually good at. Molly Hjelm, CVP of RedVest Media at Ace Hardware, makes the case that the answer was there all along: influencing decisions at the moment they’re made.
Why has the path to purchase collapsed and how have emerging areas like agentic AI change retail media’s role in broader commerce strategies?
The biggest shift we’re seeing is that LLMs are shifting and fragmenting where intent signals are happening. One can imagine a near-term future where a majority of consumers begin their journey and conduct due diligence outside of a retailer ecosystem. Even if the research is conducted off property, the actual purchase is primarily completed within in a retailer ecosystem.
That means that even if shoppers are coming into retailer environments more educated on what they want, the retailer still has the ability to influence the decision, inspire, and provide service.
Said differently, AI-fueled intent fragmentation doesn’t necessarily present an absolute existential threat to retail media but rather emphasizes what retail media is good at: influencing decision closer to the point of decision/purchase.
While there is a lot of hype around agentic commerce, it still represents a small minority of total U.S. transactions and should be closely watched. It does not hold enough weight to re-orient a retail media offering around it yet.
How has last mile integration redesigning media performance?
Last-mile delivery is reshaping the landscape by helping retailers compete with pure-play e-commerce on speed to customer, while turning their physical footprint into a distributed fulfillment network.
For Ace (DoorDash and UberEats), this means the ability to get products into customers’ hands in 30 minutes or less, items they might otherwise wait two days or more to receive from traditional online retailers. That speed advantage is critical in moments like storm prep (ice melts, shovels, generators), but it also plays a role in everyday use cases, like a customer in the middle of a DIY project who doesn’t want to lose their flow.
From a retail media perspective, this tightens the connection between intent, purchase and fulfillment. It gives brick and mortar retailers a structural edge to compress the path from inspiration to possession in a way pure-play players struggle to match.
How is loyalty unlocking deterministic targeting at scale, and where are many retail media networks still falling short?
Where consumers conduct their search, how they shop, and where they consume their content is constantly evolving and has been for decades. “Retail loyalty programs continue to serve as a foundational, stabilizing force amid that change, enabling retailers (through on-boarders, clean rooms and identity resolution partners) to reach and engage shoppers across any platform.”
The value loyalty programs provide is twofold: they create direct ongoing relationships with consumers, and they generate rich longitudinal behavioral data over time. That combination makes it possible to connect marketing exposure to real outcomes and measure the impact of messaging across channels in a way that is deterministic at scale.
