The original pitch of retail media networks was to find shoppers while they’re shopping and make the sale. Now that RMNs have accomplished that, they’re trying to convince advertisers that they can build their brands on their respective channel.

As media becomes more fragmented, traditional attribution leaves CMOs with an incomplete view of impact, and AI risks scaling decisions based on those flawed inputs. If marketing leaders are going to win over their CFO and deliver ROI, they need a new approach, one built on causal measurement rather than belief.

At CIMM, six crucial shifts emerged: AI agents now execute ad deals, measurement fuels real-time attribution, identity quality threatens the entire ecosystem, creative versioning explodes into thousands of variants, human research gains importance, and collaboration becomes non-negotiable.

That shift is moving the industry beyond what I think of as the "Content Economy" and into the "Participation Economy," where value is created not only by what media companies produce, but by what audiences choose to do with it. They share, create, discuss, recommend, remix, attend, purchase, and build communities around the stories and creators they love.

The shift is expected to continue. Performance-based fees have the strongest projected growth, with 58% of respondents expecting to increase their use, followed by value-based models at 43% and fixed-fee or output-based approaches at 36%.

For the first half of 2026, Publicis Media was tops in new business with billings of $3.24 billion, according to agency research firm COMvergence. That’s a global net figure that factors in wins, losses and retentions. Group level wins included Adidas (Greater China), HP, Microsoft and Prada. Omnicom Media ranked a close second with $3.15 billion with wins including Delta, IBM and Subway.