5 tips for aligning your commerce media and lifecycle marketing teams

In the grand scheme of marketing, commerce media networks (CMNs) are a relatively new way for brands to turn their data into business revenue. Major retailers, from Amazon and Walmart to Costco, sell right-fit audiences to third-party advertisers who want to reach those potential customers on the brand’s own channels or external ad platforms. 

As companies continue to collect more first-party data, commerce media is on a meteoric rise, projected to reach $100B in revenue by 2027. This growth, combined with low overhead costs, makes CMNs highly attractive to shareholders.

But commerce media functions aren’t the only team relying on customer data. Traditional enterprise marketing also needs data to execute high-performing campaigns that drive revenue for the business. 

More often than not, though, the CMN function and enterprise marketing operate in silos, rather than cooperatively. They rely on disparate strategies and data solutions — and that can be a significant, costly problem for both teams, not to mention the business and customers. 

The great misalignment between CMN and enterprise marketing 

In part because of the newness of CMNs and retail media networks (RMNs), many organizations set up these media network functions as separate divisions from the rest of the traditional marketing team. 

To maintain agility, the CMN is its own unit with its own source of truth for data and activation tools. The commerce media function uses its view of the customer to sell audiences and ad space to third parties as onsite inventory (for the brand’s own retail locations, web, and app ad space) or offsite inventory (for external ad platforms like Google Ads and Bing Ads). 

These goals exist separately from the lifecycle or brand marketing team’s goals. After all, one team is selling ads to other companies, and the other is promoting the brand itself. 

The functional separation between the marketing team and CMN (and duplication of data tools) keeps them from coordinating effectively:

• The CMN function creates audiences based on the brief or request from advertisers who want to target customers through the media network.

• The enterprise marketing team builds its own audiences of current and potential customers to send campaigns across channels. 

As the commerce media function grows, the team often uncovers needs for granular data that the enterprise marketing team has, like SKU-level transaction details, loyalty information, and a complete customer 360 view. But data silos stand in the way of shared access. 

The CMN team needs to activate the same dataset that the traditional marketing team has without sacrificing speed and agility—or they’ll pay the price.

The costs of divergent data solutions

Most enterprises with misalignment between marketing and commerce media may not know what’s at stake by keeping the two functions siloed in their source of truth, strategy, and solution. But they’re missing out on critical opportunities for audiences, advertisers, and their own business.

1. The consumer experience

The CMN function has one view of the customer, and the enterprise marketing team has another. As a result, commerce media can’t take into consideration what the lifecycle or brand marketing team is sending to customers. This can create a disengaged ad experience for consumers.

Even interested shoppers don’t want to be bombarded with three different emails or five offsite ads after making a purchase or converting. Without a single customer view, brands might inadvertently retarget the audience with two different competing ads, especially on onsite channels like the company website or mobile app. 

Two different functions that should be a united front end up fighting each other for the customer’s attention. The customer tunes out the messaging altogether because they’re frustrated with an uncoordinated marketing effort.

2. Ad performance and client ROI

When the CMN function has a different view of the customer relationship than the enterprise marketing team, they often miss out on the chance to develop deeper relationships with external partners and companies. 

Valuable insights might be waiting in the enterprise marketing team’s data solution. But without access to those data insights, the CMN function leaves ad revenue on the table. Instead of activating the best possible audiences for your advertisers, they see subpar conversions that could’ve been easy wins and revenue with a single source of truth.

When both teams are united under the same data solution and strategy, the CMN function can point advertisers to the best possible audiences for the highest possible ROI.

3. The redundant tech stack

Maybe the most obvious risk of having separate sources of truth and data solutions for the CMN function and the lifecycle marketing team is the cost. 

Joe Cristee, GrowthLoop Director of Solutions Engineering, explains it like this: “A number of companies across the last 10-15 years purchased hundreds, if not thousands, of SaaS tools to sit across their organization. While each has served a great purpose, the organization now has too many, and you don’t want to be paying twice for the same functionality across two different teams.”

At a time when every executive is eager to cut costs, removing redundant and siloed data solutions is a great place to start. In the process, you can create the 360 view of the customer that both teams need. 

Rather than staying siloed and fragmented, enterprise marketing and the RMN need to come together under the same roof. Ideally, that’s the roof of an enterprise data warehouse. 

Composability: The key to getting on the same page

Whatever separate sources of truth or data solutions your marketing and commerce media functions are using now, the enterprise data warehouse is your Holy Grail for data activation. 

By keeping all of your first-party customer data centralized in the cloud, you knock down the data siloes that prevent your teams from activating valuable insights. 

From there, a composable solution on top of your data cloud serves as an activation layer, enabling secure, self-service access for anyone who needs it. A composable customer data platform (like GrowthLoop) lets commerce media teams build audiences for advertisers using the same customer profile as the marketing team.

At the same time, the lifecycle and brand marketing teams can build their next campaign with context around which advertisers will be targeting those audiences via onsite channels. 

An example of CMN and lifecycle alignment

Before getting aligned, the enterprise marketing team might send a recently converted pet owner an email, SMS message, and an in-app sponsored ad for their store brand’s pet food. But the CMN lacks visibility into those campaigns, so their third-party advertisers target the same customer with ads for a different brand in the same time period. The customer receives too much marketing from too many sources. 

After aligning around a composable solution, both teams can see which campaigns the customer will receive when and strategically plan a balanced, well-timed customer journey using the full picture of the data.

Composability gives each function the flexibility to do its job well, sparking innovation and efficiency through a unified data solution. Everyone can orchestrate their tools and activate audiences from a central hub to any destination they want, and they can iterate faster without stepping on each other’s toes. 

How AI raises the stakes

Data alignment is especially critical for any organization that views AI as a central part of its strategy going forward. When tool sprawl keeps the commerce media and marketing functions operating based on different data, enterprise AI adoption is even more difficult. 

“If I’ve spent years sending data to different sources of truth and different tools, it becomes much harder to collect all of that back together and present that content to AI models and actually activate those use cases,” Joe notes. 

Both CMNs and lifecycle marketing teams can use agentic AI for audience building and countless other valuable use cases. But reaching the full potential of this powerful tech requires training models on the full scope of their centralized data. 

Composability takes agentic AI straight to the source. Agents activate the goldmine of the first-party data in your data warehouse, leading to better audience creation for CMN advertisers and higher-performing marketing campaigns for your enterprise marketing team. 

AI agents can then learn from the performance of each successive campaign, leading to growth that compounds over time. 

For AI-forward organizations, a single source of truth is no longer just valuable: It’s mission-critical.

What should we share? 5 elements for alignment

Enterprise marketing is a seasoned, longstanding function, while commerce media is an energized newcomer. Lifecycle marketers focus on selling the brand to the right audience, and CMNs sell audiences and ad space to other brands. Traditional marketers drive revenue for the business by putting their brand in front of the right people; media networks drive revenue for the business by driving ad revenue for third parties. 

But these differences don’t mean these teams are destined to stay at odds. Rallying around what they have in common and aligning under the same strategy and stack helps both functions thrive. 

Marketing ops leaders trying to get these teams on the same page need to rally both functions around these five elements. 

1. Source of truth

The first — and typically most difficult — step to aligning the marketing and CMN teams is gaining a central view of the source of truth for your data. This ideally stems from your enterprise data warehouse and a common layer that allows these teams to activate that data. 

Both teams should have a shared understanding of the types of data available (transactional, behavioral, etc.) and the identities involved (individuals, households, or businesses).

2. Audience targeting

Once you have your source of truth, turn your attention to the tool you use for audience-building and campaign creation. Both functions should have visibility into targeting logic and campaign overlap across teams. 

While lifecycle marketing likely has some always-on campaigns running, other channels may need more timing sensitivity to uphold the customer experience. For instance, SMS or push campaigns can quickly spiral out of control — if the CMN and marketing functions aren’t aligned, a customer could get 10 messages in a day, leading them to unsubscribe or opt out. 

Shared audience targeting and logic visibility help them thoughtfully strategize every campaign to avoid overwhelming customers.

3. Measurement

Both functions should have a shared understanding of how effective their campaigns are. 

For the CMN, those metrics show how much revenue the data drives. But the enterprise marketing team should also see how ads perform across the media network to better understand the customer and strategize for their own campaigns. 

Without the measurement piece of the other team, both functions are missing a complete view of the notifications or promotions targeting each individual customer. 

4. AI goal and purpose

Organizational leadership should avoid sending teams on siloed missions to explore AI solutions. 

“That’s a huge waste of resources,” Joe says. “You should have one shared AI goal across both of your teams.” 

You also can’t leverage AI well if each team operates from its own view of the customer. Once you’ve aligned everyone around a central data source and their audience-building tools, you can bring them together around AI objectives as well. 

Every data point from a past campaign informs these models, helping maximize the effectiveness of the next one. That’s the beauty of compounding growth.

5. Customer focus

Enterprise loyalty marketing teams and commerce media must align around a goal of keeping the customer at the center of everything they do. Someone on the ad sales side might see marketing as a cost center; a marketer might look at ad sales and think they’re not focused on optimizing the customer experience. 

These potential tensions call for change management on both sides. Everyone needs to rally around the shared goal of optimizing the customer experience so consumers see perfect-fit ads from third parties and well-timed offers from your brand. 

Leaders who are passionate about aligning these functions need to get good at communicating why sharing resources and tools is so important. “At the end of the day, it all comes down to a consistent experience for the customer,” Joe says. 

Align around the data, and the rest will follow

Commerce media and enterprise marketers have different KPIs, expertise, and priorities — but they shouldn’t have different data solutions or customer profiles. 

When these teams go it alone, they end up with disconnected workflows and expensive siloes. When they operate under the same data cloud and composable solution, they gain the tools to enhance the customer experience and campaigns. 

Maybe your commerce media function started off strong with a composable CDP, and it’s time to expand to the enterprise marketing team. Maybe the traditional marketers are activating from the data cloud, and the CMN team needs a 360 customer view, too. 

Whichever team needs composability, the sooner you align around a single source of truth and data strategy, the better off your business will be. Unlock your cloud data, uncover revenue opportunities with AI insights, and accelerate growth from all sides. 

Ready to take the first step to alignment? Schedule a personalized demo of the GrowthLoop Compound Marketing Engine with one of our experts.