Commerce media is the third wave of digital advertising. Outcomes beat impressions. And what you do in the face of adversity decides your destiny.

Conlin's New York story and the founding story of Fluent started two weeks before 9/11, when he began university in the city. He graduated in 2005 in the early days of digital and performance marketing, taking his first job at an early performance marketing company, and has been in the category for 20-plus years. The feel for it came earlier. His father ran a marketing and design firm in Ann Arbor, Michigan, doing catalogue work for General Motors, and if you added a roof rack and fender flares at a 1990s Chevrolet dealership, RJ Conlin Inc created the work. He spent childhood photo shoots shining up cars for the photographer, so after interviewing at architecture firms, publishing firms and ad agencies, it was a digital marketing firm that gave him his first shot.

He was going to print shops back in the day, running a massive amount of catalogue print work, direct mail and everything in between. A lot of those mediums are not what they once were, thanks to the rise of digital and, more importantly, the performance and outcomes-based economy.

Fluent's core business is driving outcomes. Early on, brands were so excited to test a new medium that they told their bosses they bought a lot of impressions, without asking if those impressions drove a click, a conversion or a sale. University of Phoenix was buying huge amounts of digital media without always tracking enrolments. The biggest change over 20 years is an intense focus on quality over quantity, holding every dollar to a true return on ad spend, which forces companies to rewire their stack and optimise on lifetime value rather than the first action.

In mobile gaming, not a dollar is deployed without a clear purpose. Marketers want 10 percent of spend back by day seven, 15 percent by day 14, 25 percent by day 30 and beyond to day 180, meticulously measuring lifetime value and retention. They share those insights back, so a platform like Fluent can optimise around the users who install, play, love it and keep investing their time, which lets advertisers bid more and benefits commerce partners.

Within the $300 billion digital ad ecosystem, most dollars went to Google and Meta, and then Amazon made it a triopoly. That pressured large retail, travel and financial services companies to ask why all the ad dollars were going elsewhere when they had the users. They started monetising their own sites and becoming ad platforms. There are now 250 retail and commerce media networks, led by Amazon and Walmart, and the ad dollars are catching up to where consumers spend their time.

The edge of these networks is closed-loop measurement and first-party data. They know their shoppers, control the user experience and can prove results. Procter and Gamble can go to Walmart Connect and measure whether a new product drives more sales, digital and in-store. It is not squishy, which is why commerce media has grown from zero towards $100 billion of annual spend.

The first step is getting buy-in from leadership through education and evangelisation, because becoming an advertising business is a philosophical departure from selling products off shelves. Once everyone is comfortable, you make the investments. Phase one is maximising finite on-site inventory, every keyword search and display unit. Phase two, once leadership loves the margin, is making audiences addressable for off-site targeting across CTV and other channels.

Mature players who have maximised on-site and off-site start exploring non-endemic verticals that add value even where they do not sell the product. After booking a Wyndham hotel, a shopper might see an Enterprise rental car offer or a Disney Plus trial for a rainy Florida room. The next frontier is the in-store moment, where 80 to 85 percent of US transactions still happen, so Fluent is investing to enrich that moment at the kiosk with relevant offers.

By Conlin's account, UK retailers and customers are more open to in-store monetisation, with a bigger presence and more mature infrastructure. The US has been more reticent about maximising monetisation in the in-store moment, even though the transaction volume there is enormous.

As stores move toward experiential spaces rather than pure retail, that plays well for more digital point-of-sale activity, which is exactly where Conlin sees the opportunity heading.

A recurring theme is that trained merchandising leads often run the digital advertising practice at these networks, but that skill rarely translates to building the required technology and product. So the large players are investing in talent from the digital marketing and ad tech world, because a merchandiser rarely picks up the discipline intuitively.

Where Fluent comes in is revenue as a service. Instead of SaaS, when you plug in the technology it arrives with demand from hundreds of advertisers bidding into the platform, whether post-transaction, in loyalty or in store. Some partners want Fluent to handle it, others want to sell some themselves, so the company serves as a bridge depending on where they are in the journey.

AI-informed product discovery is growing fast, but for now people use AI for advice while a human still executes most buys. Repeatable categories like weekly groceries suit an agent, but plenty of people still want to shop themselves, and Conlin admits he still wants to try on his jeans and sneakers first. Fully agentic shopping is a way off, though some categories are ripe for it.

The LLMs are leveraged most for travel, financial services and health and wellness, all complex decisions where people often start and stop at research. Meanwhile everyone recognises value in becoming a publisher. Walmart's brick-and-mortar business runs at about four and a half percent margin, while Walmart Connect runs at over 60 percent margins and, though under 10 percent of revenue, drives over a third of net income.

Conlin learned to lead early, running a New York team for a UK-based firm launching its US office, which he and his co-founder grew from zero to $30 million in three years while they were roommates comparing notes each night. That gave them a blueprint. Fluent's thesis was product first: build good product that enriches consumers and publishers, and the advertisers will come. That took the company from zero to $40 million of revenue in its first year, followed by acquisition in 2015 and regaining control in 2018.

Fluent has made at least five major pivots, on the mantra that a business not growing and innovating gets lapped. Over the last couple of years it took $100 million of top line revenue off the board to rebuild its technology stack and reinvest in commerce media, trading less valuable dollars for a more valuable line of business. It is never a straight line, and the first challenges can rock a founder's ego before you learn that this is just business.

Culture has to keep evolving, because the A players who take a company from zero to one can be C players taking it from one to two. COVID put everyone's culture through the blender, from a thriving office to remote and hybrid, and keeping the fabric together takes intentional investment and radical transparency into what is working and what is not. Conlin points to repeated best places to work awards through Crain's and Ad Age.

Conlin hires for curiosity, grit and tenacity over which college someone attended, looking for the entrepreneurial spirit to find five ways to solve a problem. He resets through entrepreneur biographies and, unusually, transformational breathwork sessions in the office. He admires Walmart's focus on associates, customers and everyday low prices, and tells young people that time and energy are on their side, so put yourself out there, because your network is your net worth.