Special Edition: The $100bn Commerce Media Opportunity - Matt Conlin, Founder & Chief Customer Of...

Commerce media is emerging as one of the biggest shifts in digital advertising. Search defined the 2000s. Social reshaped the 2010s. Now retailers, travel companies and other businesses are building media businesses around something potentially even more valuable: first-party customer relationships, purchase data and proximity to the transaction. In this special edition of The Business of Marketing, John Horsley is joined by Matt Conlin, Founder & Chief Customer Officer at Fluent, to explore where commerce media goes next. Matt describes it as the third major wave of digital media, with the category now tracking towards $100 billion in annual spend. They discuss why the industry is moving from impressions and clicks towards measurable business outcomes, how retail media is expanding beyond onsite advertising into offsite audiences, non-endemic offers and physical stores, and why more businesses are beginning to think and act like publishers. They also look at how AI and agentic commerce could reshape product discovery, purchasing and the wider customer journey, and what brands need to consider as consumers increasingly use AI to research complex decisions. The conversation then turns to Matt’s own founder story: building Fluent from zero to $40 million in revenue in its first year, navigating acquisition and public-company life, and making the decision to remove $100 million of revenue from the business in order to reinvest in what Fluent believed would be its next growth engine. They also discuss leadership, culture, resilience, hiring and why Matt looks for three qualities above almost everything else: curiosity, grit and tenacity. A conversation about the next era of digital advertising, and what it takes to keep reinventing a business while the market changes around you.