Build or buy? The best way to create a commerce media network

Every business today is a data business. No matter your industry, you’re sitting on terabytes of rich, first-party customer data that brands and advertisers are hungry to access.

Commerce media is the next $100B opportunity for companies looking to monetize their first-party data, but success depends on one thing: how fast you can turn that data into revenue. The retailers, platforms, and publishers who win this race will do it with composable technology built on the data cloud and not custom stacks that take years to deploy.

The difference comes down to technology. Marketers looking to build a commerce media network face a question foundational to every software project: Should they build the commerce media network internally or buy a composable, purpose-built solution?

The how and why of build vs. buy

The power of a commerce media network derives from the technology that underlies it. Anchoring any successful commerce media network is an enterprise data cloud that centralizes information about customers and their purchasing behavior, the first-party data needed to build custom, precise audiences.

At the other end, commerce media networks employ onsite ad servers and demand-side platforms (DSPs) to get the right messaging to the right customers at the right time.

In between sits the most critical piece: the audience and intelligence layer that enables marketers to build audiences, activate them across the ad-tech stack, and measure performance, all without requiring data or engineering support. 

This middle layer is where most organizations face their biggest decision: whether to build the capabilities themselves or buy a platform that delivers them out of the box.

Building internally

At first glance, building your own commerce media network might seem logical. Your engineering team understands your systems, you can design workflows to your exact specifications, and you maintain full control over data governance.

But the scope of what you’re building is far larger than most teams anticipate, and we have not even mentioned AI yet.

A commerce media network isn’t just a few dashboards and APIs. It requires an entirely new suite of capabilities, including:

• Sophisticated identity resolution to merge data from multiple, fragmented sources into accurate customer profiles.

• Real-time audience building and activation across dozens of channels, each with its own formatting and API requirements.

• Automated feedback loops that bring campaign performance data back into your warehouse for measurement and optimization.

• Governed data segmentation so brands only see what they’re authorized to see, and nothing else.

• Integrations with clean rooms, ad servers, and DSPs, each of which evolves constantly.

• Now, add a semantic layer that translates your data and models into agent-speak. The future is agents across systems talking to each other and making decisions based on your data in milliseconds. 

For an internal engineering team, building products that aren’t their core business can mean sacrificing functionality, jeopardizing quality, and introducing multiple potential points of failure. Building instead of buying can also mean waiting months — or even years — to get up and running. Building also involves technical maintenance, which adds to engineering’s workloads and increases tech debt.

In short, internal builds are very often slow, expensive, and resource-intensive.

Buying a composable solution

When you buy a purpose-built platform, you’re buying time, expertise, and the ability to scale your commerce media network easily and quickly. 

An audience-building solution whose sole focus is helping companies turn first-party data into revenue has already solved the hard problem of accessing your first-party data, building precise audiences with the freshest data, and keeping pace with evolving governance standards. By choosing a proven solution, you skip years of trial and error and have an audience-building layer that’s ready to run almost immediately within your commerce media network.

Companies can start building audiences and launching campaigns in weeks and while your commerce media network gets off the ground, your engineers stay focused on the work that matters most to your business, not maintaining or building audiences from your data cloud. 

Buying also means the technology never stops improving, as the technology is developed by teams who live and breathe composable audience-building and measurement. You automatically benefit from that collective innovation.

Building with the right foundation 

The decision to build or buy is ultimately about focus. Building internally offers full control but diverts time and resources from innovation in your core business. Buying a composable, warehouse-native audience layer gives you access to technology that’s already proven and maintained by teams dedicated to solving this exact problem.

In an environment where advertisers expect transparency, speed, and measurable performance, the companies that succeed will be those that can move quickly without sacrificing data integrity. Whether you build or buy, the goal is to build a commerce media network that can scale responsibly, operate efficiently, and learn from every campaign.