Retail Media’s Fragmentation Problem Is Finally Getting Fixed, WunderKIND Says
The walls around retail data are starting to come down – and the timing could hardly be better. With U.S. omnichannel retail media ad spending projected to reach $71.67 billion in 2026, according to an eMarketer forecast, the pressure on the industry to make that inventory more accessible and scalable is pretty great.
But recent moves suggest the pipes are being laid. Walmart Connect audiences becoming available in DV360, and The Trade Desk aggregating data from commerce media partners in the travel sector, both point to a market quietly reorganizing itself around interoperability rather than exclusivity.
For Helen Boram, senior director of operations at WunderKIND Ads, these are signals of a structural shift, she said in a video interview with Beet.TV at Cannes Lions 2026.
Breaking down the walled gardens
Boram has spent 11 years at WunderKIND, moving from its e-commerce SaaS roots to the advertising product side in 2017, and now focuses on platform partnerships and new product development. That vantage point gives her a long view on how advertisers have struggled to access the audience data they actually want.
“Advertisers want access to unique audience segments that are performance-driven and going to supplement their strategy,” she said. “But historically, a lot of the most scalable segments have been limited to the walled gardens, and then some of the more transactional or behavioral-based segments from individual retailers can be hard to activate particularly at scale.”
The result, she argued, has been a kind of forced improvisation. “Advertisers have been left to take a mix of what’s available and figure out what’s going to work best for their individual strategies,” Boram said – a suboptimal arrangement that the industry’s latest consolidation moves are beginning to address.
CTV and shoppable formats take center stage
WunderKIND built its reputation on high-impact, behaviorally triggered ad formats for publishers, and has been expanding into connected TV with what it describes as advanced formats focused on measurement and outcomes.
A campaign with Ulta Beauty offers an early proof point: a programmatic CTV pause ad campaign during the holiday season that the company says delivered a 79% decrease in cost per store visit and a 54% higher conversion rate for store visits compared to benchmarks. The results point to what Boram described as a “good reception” for the outcomes-focused approach WunderKIND is pursuing in the CTV space.
“I’m excited to see how the shopping experience continues to evolve,” Boram said, citing shoppable CTV as an area of particular interest. “We’re doing a lot with advanced formats right now with a focus on measurement and outcomes.”
Agentic commerce: opportunity in the unknown
Beyond the near-term mechanics of retail media consolidation and CTV formats, Boram flagged a more speculative but potentially consequential development on the horizon: agentic commerce, in which AI agents make purchasing decisions on behalf of consumers.
The concept – still nascent and undefined in terms of how it will reach mass adoption – raises significant questions for advertisers about where and how brand messages will land when a bot, not a human, is doing the browsing and buying.
“I don’t know if anyone knows exactly what that’s going to look like at full adoption,” Boram acknowledged, “but I’m sure that there are challenges that are going to arise.”
She expressed confidence that WunderKIND’s positioning in the data layer of the advertising stack could prove useful as those challenges crystallize. “We hope to be helpful to our buyers and in a position, due to the place where we sit in the industry, to help advertisers – particularly from a data perspective – address some of those,” she said.
The walls around retail data are starting to come down – and the timing could hardly be better. With U.S. omnichannel retail media ad spending projected to reach $71.67 billion in 2026, according to an eMarketer forecast, the pressure on the industry to make that inventory more accessible and scalable is pretty great.
But recent moves suggest the pipes are being laid. Walmart Connect audiences becoming available in DV360, and The Trade Desk aggregating data from commerce media partners in the travel sector, both point to a market quietly reorganizing itself around interoperability rather than exclusivity.
For Helen Boram, senior director of operations at WunderKIND Ads, these are signals of a structural shift, she said in a video interview with Beet.TV at Cannes Lions 2026.
Breaking down the walled gardens
Boram has spent 11 years at WunderKIND, moving from its e-commerce SaaS roots to the advertising product side in 2017, and now focuses on platform partnerships and new product development. That vantage point gives her a long view on how advertisers have struggled to access the audience data they actually want.
“Advertisers want access to unique audience segments that are performance-driven and going to supplement their strategy,” she said. “But historically, a lot of the most scalable segments have been limited to the walled gardens, and then some of the more transactional or behavioral-based segments from individual retailers can be hard to activate particularly at scale.”
The result, she argued, has been a kind of forced improvisation. “Advertisers have been left to take a mix of what’s available and figure out what’s going to work best for their individual strategies,” Boram said – a suboptimal arrangement that the industry’s latest consolidation moves are beginning to address.
CTV and shoppable formats take center stage
WunderKIND built its reputation on high-impact, behaviorally triggered ad formats for publishers, and has been expanding into connected TV with what it describes as advanced formats focused on measurement and outcomes.
A campaign with Ulta Beauty offers an early proof point: a programmatic CTV pause ad campaign during the holiday season that the company says delivered a 79% decrease in cost per store visit and a 54% higher conversion rate for store visits compared to benchmarks. The results point to what Boram described as a “good reception” for the outcomes-focused approach WunderKIND is pursuing in the CTV space.
“I’m excited to see how the shopping experience continues to evolve,” Boram said, citing shoppable CTV as an area of particular interest. “We’re doing a lot with advanced formats right now with a focus on measurement and outcomes.”
Agentic commerce: opportunity in the unknown
Beyond the near-term mechanics of retail media consolidation and CTV formats, Boram flagged a more speculative but potentially consequential development on the horizon: agentic commerce, in which AI agents make purchasing decisions on behalf of consumers.
The concept – still nascent and undefined in terms of how it will reach mass adoption – raises significant questions for advertisers about where and how brand messages will land when a bot, not a human, is doing the browsing and buying.
“I don’t know if anyone knows exactly what that’s going to look like at full adoption,” Boram acknowledged, “but I’m sure that there are challenges that are going to arise.”
She expressed confidence that WunderKIND’s positioning in the data layer of the advertising stack could prove useful as those challenges crystallize. “We hope to be helpful to our buyers and in a position, due to the place where we sit in the industry, to help advertisers – particularly from a data perspective – address some of those,” she said.
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