Yahoo’s Commerce Media Strategy: Efficiency, Identity, and Scale

How Yahoo DSP is helping retailers and brands scale smarter in a fragmented commerce world.

At Shoptalk 2025, Beth Nussbaum Gross, who leads global commerce media at Yahoo DSP, laid out a vision that blends technical scale with strategic simplicity: help partners activate commerce media efficiently, transparently, and with more control.

With deep roots across brand, shopper agency, and retail experience—including time at Method Products and Safeway—Gross emphasized the value of practical execution over hype.

Beyond Retail: Why Yahoo DSP’s Platform Is Built for More Than Just CPG

Yahoo DSP’s commerce media approach isn’t limited to traditional retailers. It supports everything from Planet Fitness to financial partners like Afterpay Media Network in Australia. By pairing Yahoo’s consent-based 232M+ logged-in U.S. users with retailer’s CRM data, the platform enables privacy-centric audience expansion via the Yahoo DSP—offering targeting, personalization, and reach without requiring brands to manage dozens of siloed platforms.

Retailers like Lowe’s are already integrating this model to offer offsite activation for brand partners such as Sherwin-Williams and Metabo—driving performance during high-traffic campaigns like tentpole events.

Aggregation Is the Unlock

Gross believes the future of commerce media lies in aggregation—not just of data, but of partner access.

Many of Yahoo DSP’s clients are trying to manage 10–20 different RMNs with limited internal bandwidth. In her words, “you also have 20 teams doing the exact same thing—buying from different retailers, switching out a logo on the same creative.” Yahoo DSP’s model helps consolidate that chaos through dynamic creative and omnichannel ad formats, all while maintaining retailer-specific nuances.

Identity Is Yahoo DSP’s Differentiator

As a publisher-first platform, Yahoo has a long-standing, consent-based relationship with consumers across mail, finance, sports, shopping, and news. This backbone enables it to offer first-party identity, called Yahoo ConnectID that powers clean partner matches, audience extension, and privacy-first targeting for advertisers.

This is particularly appealing to clients navigating the post-cookie era, who want to activate first-party data across supply paths without sacrificing performance or privacy.

In-Flight Measurement: Moving Beyond Buzzwords

Gross pointed to Yahoo DSP’s In-Flight Sales Analysis tool as a major differentiator—offering real-time campaign optimization tied to both online and offline sales. The message to brands: stop waiting for post-campaign reports and start optimizing against actual Point Of Sale (POS) data mid-flight.

Measurement, she noted, only works if brands are aligned from the start. Too often, partners enter joint business planning without clarity on what success looks like—whether that’s new households, reactivation, or incrementality. Yahoo’s strength, she argued, is enabling flexibility on the “how” without confusion on the “why.”

From Costco to The Home Depot: Scaling the Edge of Commerce

Recent partnerships with Costco, Kroger Precision Marketing reflect Yahoo DSP’s efforts to support both brand engagement and transactional value.

Gross noted that the convergence of financial services and commerce is one of the most exciting developments on the horizon—with credit card companies, BNPL platforms, and retail loyalty systems all now part of the same ecosystem.

What Yahoo DSP Is Teaching the Commerce Media Market

• Aggregation isn’t a backend fix—it’s a strategic unlock

• Measurement must be live, not lagging

• First-party identity is the new competitive edge

• Efficiency comes from interoperability—not just spend compression

• The best platforms offer both choice and control

Yahoo DSP may not be new to media, but its evolving role in commerce is drawing attention for the right reasons: not because it’s flashy, but because it’s functional.

Independently Created. Not affiliated with Shoptalk.

ClickZ is a Contentive publication in the Events division