"One of the biggest disconnects in our industry today is that commerce media has shoppers experience a certain single, continuous omnichannel journey," said Guthrie Collin, vice president of product at Roundel, during the Interactive Advertising Bureau's (IAB) recent Connected Commerce event. "But in our world, media, data, technology, measurement systems, we think of them, and they still operate in quite a fragmented way."

The conversation with Collin Colburn, vice president of commerce and retail media at IAB, highlighted how Target's retail media network is moving away from traditional post-campaign measurement toward using shopping signals to optimize campaigns in real time. It's a shift that's producing measurable results for brands.

The fundamental problem

Consumer shopping behavior has outpaced the marketing systems designed to track it, experts say, creating a disconnect between how people actually shop and how media is planned and optimized.

Collin used a hiking analogy to illustrate the challenge: Marketers create specific paths they hope consumers will follow, but shoppers wander off in unpredictable directions. The traditional approach has been to use measurement, "sending rangers out after them," to understand where consumers went after the fact.

At Roundel, he said 30% of campaign volume by spend now occurs off Target's owned properties, compared to an industry standard of around 21% for retail media networks. This demonstrates that consumers want to engage with brands across multiple touchpoints, not just on retailer sites.

Rather than trying to control the consumer journey, Roundel developed a product called Precision Plus that shares Target's shopping signals with off-site media partners in real time.

"We realized that by giving up control, thinking about the total journey instead of a path, and by partnering really closely and sharing our data in a privacy-safe way, we would actually drive results," Collin said.

This represents a fundamental shift in how retail media networks operate. Rather than protecting first-party data as a competitive advantage, Roundel is using it as a collaborative tool to improve campaign performance across the entire ecosystem.

The Spin Master case study

Collin said Spin Master, manufacturer of the children's toy Kinetic Sand, ran a full-funnel holiday campaign using Precision Plus to demonstrate the impact of signal-sharing versus traditional approaches.

The campaign sent real-time data about specific SKUs to social and search partners throughout the campaign, allowing those platforms to optimize their algorithms based on actual shopping behavior. He said the results compared to the previous year's campaign using traditional off-site products showed:

• Increased click-through rates
• Improved return on ad spend
• Significant growth in new-to-brand customers during the competitive holiday toy season

"Someone added to their list, they have a different experience on our partners the next day, or sometimes that same day, because we're sharing those signals directly with off-site partners in a privacy-safe way," Collin explained.

The new-to-brand metric is particularly significant because it demonstrates that signal-informed optimization doesn't just drive efficiency, it changes who brands can reach and when.

The operational challenges of signal-based optimization

Building the infrastructure to share signals at scale required substantial investment and organizational change, Collin said.

He said the technical challenges included:

• Maintaining consumer privacy and trust while sharing data
• Building systems to handle SKU-level data for all products sold at Target simultaneously
• Working with off-site partners who had never received SKU-level data before
• Partnering with capability providers to syndicate data across the ecosystem in real time

The project took approximately 18 months from concept to launch, according to Collin. Roundel also had to retrain its sales and service teams to sell integrated solutions rather than individual media products, a significant shift in mindset and approach.

The rollout started with select categories over six months before expanding to all categories ahead of the holiday season.

"We're still working on it. We're still working out the tweaks of how we go to market, how we talk about it, even how the tech works, because we want to add more signals," said Collin.

For brands trying to move away from siloed planning and measurement, the key is redefining what control means in an integrated ecosystem.

"You could be fighting to swim upstream, and that's what you're doing when trying to control where you want to go," said Collin. "Or you can say, I'm gonna get to the bank on the other side, but go with the flow."

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