This isn’t a punchline. It’s a power shift. A quiet, calculated restructuring of digital advertising as we know it—one where the names you already know are building sandcastles, only now they’re made of steel-reinforced data walls and guarded by AI with laser eyes.

Let’s stop sugarcoating this. What’s being called “the convergence of retail media, connected TV, and artificial intelligence” in breathless analyst decks is really something more sinister:

The formation of a new ruling class in advertising.

And no, you’re probably not invited.

Let’s start with retail media, which has quietly morphed from a few sponsored listings next to mouthwash into a full-blown advertising death star. It’s Google on steroids—except instead of organizing the world’s information, it’s just reorganizing your credit card statement.

Amazon figured out that it doesn’t have to just sell stuff; it can sell access to the people trying to buy stuff. And now Walmart, Target, Instacart, Kroger, and basically every store that once sold you Lunchables is pivoting into ad networks.

These platforms have what every advertiser craves:

They don’t want to be media channels.
They want to be the infrastructure of influence.

Now, over to connected TV—which is sort of like your ex who got really into crypto. Flashy, unstable, and deeply misunderstood.

CTV is where your ad dollars go when they’re tired of being measured. It’s sleek. It’s growing. It promises to merge TV’s emotional power with digital’s precision… except it rarely delivers either with consistency.

It’s a landscape where 90% of the spend is programmatic, but 90% of the buyers still don’t really understand what that means. Every platform has its own definition of “view,” “completion,” and “engagement.” Your media buyer swears they optimized frequency—meanwhile, your ad ran 27 times during “Guy’s Grocery Games” on a screen no one was watching.

Still, CTV is where the attention is. And attention, in 2025, is scarcer than common sense on Twitter.

The platforms know it. The retailers know it.
And so does the third vertex of this triangle: AI.

Let’s talk about the darling of every press release: artificial intelligence.

If Retail Media is the brain and CTV is the body, AI is the slick-talking, overpromising consultant who’s just moved into your guest room and rewired the thermostat.

Yes, AI can be magical. It can:

But here’s the inconvenient truth:
AI is also making the walls higher, the gates tighter, and the exits harder to find.

The more you rely on AI, the more you’re relying on their AI.
Amazon’s AI. Roku’s AI. Walmart’s AI.
You think you’re optimizing. But what you’re actually doing is outsourcing your strategy to a black box that reports to someone else’s boardroom.

And that AI? It’s not neutral. It works for the platforms. It protects the ecosystems.
It isn’t democratizing access—it’s reinforcing hierarchies.

So let’s zoom out.

Amazon, Walmart, Roku, Vizio, and their ilk aren’t just carving out market share.
They’re building mini-monarchies, complete with:

It’s a full-stack land grab, and it’s happening faster than most brands realize.

These aren’t “partnerships.”
They’re feudal contracts.
You’re either in the system, or you’re standing outside throwing dollars over the drawbridge and hoping for an ROAS receipt.

And that drawbridge? It’s now controlled by AI.

If you’ve made it this far, you probably get it.
This isn’t just a new marketing model.

It’s the next stage of digital colonization.

The power triangle—Retail Media, CTV, and AI—isn’t some nifty alignment of forces to help you do better targeting. It’s the convergence of:

They don’t want your input.
They want your budget, your audience, and your dependency.

This is not a trend.
It’s a reconfiguration of power.

And if you’re not sitting inside the triangle, you’re the variable being optimized against.

So:
Why should you care?
Because if you’re not already adapting to this shift, you’re not a marketer.
You’re just another line in someone else’s dashboard.

Stay bold. Stay curious. Know more than you did yesterday.
Then maybe—maybe—you’ll still be standing when the walls are done being built.

Michael Komasinski, CEO of Criteo, gave us a peek behind the curtain—and what he's building isn’t just a smarter ad platform, it's a blueprint for reshaping the digital commerce battlefield.

Forget trade budgets. Komasinski’s marching orders are clear: national media budgets are the new prize, and Criteo wants to be the Sherpa guiding brands up that spend-heavy mountain. The goal? Make buying retail media as easy as hitting “add to cart.” That means smoother UX, cross-retailer standardization, and metrics that actually make sense (looking at you, clickthrough rate).

Performance is no longer just a bottom-feeder chasing conversions. Komasinski is pumping Criteo’s core algorithms with growth hormones—mid-funnel discovery, upper-funnel branding, and even CTV are on the table. It’s all about turning a performance engine into a storytelling machine across screens and formats. Think of it as P90X for ROAS.

Criteo’s new love language? Incrementality. Komasinski is done with vanity metrics—he wants market share movement tied to spend. As he put it, “Is it moving the needle?” If the answer is no, he’s not interested. Criteo’s strategy is to be the number one supplier to the retail media industry by showing what actually works.

Here’s where it gets wild. Komasinski doesn’t just see AI agents as a novelty—he sees them as the new homepage. Every brand, publisher, and retailer will need one. These agents will talk to other agents, surf the web for you, and—critically—run on an advertising-fueled data feedback loop. Ads won’t just fund these bots, they'll train them. Think “Google Search meets ChatGPT but for commerce.”

According to Komasinski, the agentic web won’t be owned by a single player. Instead, every retailer, every brand, every publisher will have their own agent acting as a storefront, a concierge, and a deal-closer all in one. In his words, they’ll be “the new version of your website.”

Artificial Intelligence has become the lubricant of the modern advertising machine—smoothing over inefficiencies, automating complexity, and, if you’re not paying attention, quietly redrawing the rules of who gets to play and who gets left behind.

Yes, AI promises faster, smarter, more responsive campaigns. But here’s the catch: those efficiencies don’t belong to you. They belong to the platforms.

AI’s prowess in audience segmentation is remarkable. It can slice and dice shopper intent with surgical precision, surfacing patterns a human media planner would never see. But all this intelligence lives inside the walls of platforms like Amazon, Walmart, and Roku. You're not accessing a smarter open web—you're accessing their proprietary data, on their terms, using their tools.

Want to target high-intent shampoo buyers who also binge prestige dramas and recently searched for "scalp detox"? AI can make that happen.
But only if you’re already inside the garden. Outside? You're marketing by flashlight.

AI can now generate hundreds of ad variations in seconds. Swap in product images, change copy, tweak offers—localized, seasonal, even sentiment-driven. For marketers used to endless rounds of creative approval, it feels like magic.

But it’s not magic—it’s math. Math controlled by the same platforms that own the inventory. You’re not just automating ads; you’re automating lock-in.

And with every "personalized" variation sent into the void, you're relying more heavily on systems you can't audit or verify. The creative gets better, sure. But better for whom?

As CTV CPMs continue to climb, fraud has become a lucrative business. AI has been deployed to detect bot traffic, spoofed impressions, and inventory manipulation in real time. And it works—until it doesn’t.

The problem is that AI is playing both sides. The same tools that detect fraud are being used to design new flavors of it. Think of it as a cat-and-mouse game where the cat is also selling cheese.

Even major verification vendors admit that CTV remains one of the murkiest corners of programmatic advertising. AI may be catching bad actors faster—but the bad actors are upgrading, too.

AI now drives roughly 90% of CTV programmatic spend, but most advertisers still can’t explain how their inventory was sourced or why their frequency capping failed. The system is too complex, too fragmented, and too dependent on AI logic that wasn’t built for human oversight—it was built for machine-scale optimization.

This isn’t about replacing humans.
It’s about designing a system where humans can’t keep up unless they surrender control.

That’s the real AI story in 2025:
Not that it’s coming for your job. But that it’s coming for your ability to ask questions about how your job works.