Host: Paul McIntyre, Editor-At-Large

Despite a multi-year boom, there’s an abundance of retail executive teams around the world disappointed with their retail media network initiatives - largely because of a misleading valuation method influencing what retailers think they can extract in advertising terms from their physical and digital store media assets.

That’s one key finding in the first global report from Sonder on the owned media sector – that is, companies and brands with large customer bases which commercialise their publishing, retail and digital assets with suppliers, and increasingly advertisers beyond.

Sonder estimates owned media has a commercial potential of $573 billion – the global advertising business (paid media) is forecast to hit 1 trillion by 2028 or sooner.

But the bullish performance of retailers operating as media networks, partly fuelled by Amazon’s digital advertising romp, is masking some big challenges and a few open field revenue opportunities for some in commerce media, a derivative of retail media for telcos, airlines, financial services and others, says the Sonder 2026 Global Report on Owned Media.

Andrew Lipsman is a former e-marketer analyst and currently a founding advisor and strategist at Colosseum, a specialist commerce and media advisory founded by the former president of Best Buy Ads, Media & CRM, Keith Ryan, in the US.

Lipsman joins Sonder co-founders and report authors Jonathan Hopkins and Angus Frazer to unpack some wayward market developments slowly correcting and some new players shaking up the owned media model: ”There does seem to be a significant misconception here that e-commerce is way bigger than it actually is,” says Lipsman on one of the report’s findings that retail media networks and advertisers are locked on retailer digital assets - dwarfed in spending and customer volume by physical retail. Marketers are not following the money, say Lipsman and Sonder.

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‘Inherently reckless’: Retailers’ inflated ‘owned media’ asset values are ‘wreaking havoc’; telcos, finance the biggest laggards in first global report on $573bn owned media sector

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