The Future of Brand Discovery: How Commerce is Leaving the Storefront Behind

Rethinking the Conversion Model

In the time of distributed commerce, the traditional attribution model of last-click measurement breaks down. Brands need to adapt at the infrastructure level. Walmart embedded its own artificial intelligence layer, Sparky, into third-party interfaces while keeping the transaction anchored in its own environment. The customer relationship and basket data remain under Walmart's control, even when discovery starts elsewhere. That's the model worth studying … not because Walmart built an AI tool, but because it understood that owning the transaction moment matters more than owning the discovery moment.

Retail media networks (RMNs) are facing the same structural challenge. U.S. advertisers will spend $71 billion on retail media in 2026, per eMarketer, but much of that inventory sits inside retailer-owned environments while consumer attention is increasingly off-site. A 2025 survey from Koddi and Forrester Consulting found that just 12 percent of commerce media decision-makers in North America and Europe report having true capabilities across on-site and off-site environments. That gap, between where attention lives and where transactions are built to happen, is where the next infrastructure battle is being fought.

Building for Where Attention Already Exists

When discovery is increasingly handled by systems that brands cannot directly control, whether it’s AI interfaces, algorithmic feeds, or connected TV,  the opportunity lies in being transaction-ready at the moment a consumer forms intent, on whatever surface they happen to be using. And the brands winning this transition are embedding the storefront into the content itself, not waiting for consumers to find them.

We've seen this play out directly in campaigns that embed checkout inside publisher video environments, where removing the redirect to a retail site produced 122 percent unit sales uplift and 136 percent transaction value growth. In these cases, the friction comes from the gap between intent and action, even though many might think price and consideration are more important factors. Closing that gap, at the content layer, is what moves the number.

To thrive in a world of distributed commerce, brands must stop treating the storefront as the endpoint and start building for conversion wherever attention already exists. That means investing in product data infrastructure that machines can read and act on and developing attribution models that can track a consumer from a social video to a chatbot recommendation to a purchase completed inside a publisher environment. It also means accepting that the checkout experience itself is now a media surface that belongs in the feed, the video, and the AI interface, not three clicks away from it.

McKinsey projects $3 trillion to $5 trillion in global agent-mediated commerce by 2030. Most of those purchases won't begin on a brand's website. The brands that embed transaction infrastructure into the surfaces where attention already lives — in the next 18 months, not the next five years — will own the conversion layer when that market arrives. Everyone else will be paying to rent attention they can't convert.

Paul Blackburn is chief growth officer at Vudoo, a global commerce media technology company.