Our Mission
IAB’s Commerce Center of Excellence’s mission is to accelerate the growth and maturity of commerce media by defining its ecosystem, establishing standards and best practices, and fostering collaboration across brands, agencies, retailers, and technology platforms. The Center acts as the industry’s hub for education, guidance, and innovation – ensuring that commerce-driven media delivers both business impact and better customers experiences.
2026 Initiatives
- Creating a Sustainable, Competitive Commerce Media Ecosystem – we will define a framework for commerce networks to integrate media into their overall business strategy to support a profitable and sustainable growth engine for the broader ecosystem.
- Best Practices for Data Collaboration & Clean Rooms in Commerce Media – we will address governance, interoperability, and transparency in clean rooms for commerce media.
- Defining Social Commerce’s Role In Digital Advertising – we will explore how social commerce fits into the overall value chain and highlight its unique advantages.
Our Work
- Define and standardize the ecosystem – develop shared language and frameworks that clarify how commerce media and retail media fit within the broader digital advertising and marketing ecosystem.
- Drive measurement maturity – advance industry-wide alignment on incrementality, in-store measurement, and closed-loop reporting.
- Champion data collaboration and privacy-safe activation – promote responsible use of first-party data.
- Enable industry education and readiness – build thought leadership initiatives that help the industry operationalize commerce media effectively.
- Foster cross-channel convergence – bridge the gap between online and offline and commerce and media, and support integrations with the creator economy, CTV, and emerging environments.