Felipe Abed, Klarna's global product lead for commerce media and advertising, is serving as a juror for The Drum Commerce Media Awards and has outl...
The Signal
Felipe Abed, Klarna's global product lead for commerce media and advertising, is serving as a juror for The Drum Commerce Media Awards and has outlined the three forces he sees reshaping the category in 2026: the expansion of commerce media into a genuine omnichannel layer spanning onsite, offsite, CTV, and emerging seller categories like financial services and travel; the industry's shift from growth-at-all-costs to proof of value through standardized reporting and incrementality measurement; and AI's active role in reshaping discovery, creative production, and measurement execution. Abed brings platform-level credibility to the juror role, having held senior positions at Meta and Smartly.io before joining Klarna. He points to Klarna's own infrastructure as a live proof point: the company has deployed an AI assistant extended into shopping-oriented experiences, accelerated creative production through AI, announced an AI-first partnership with Google Cloud, and launched an agentic commerce protocol enabling standardized agent-driven transactions. His stated judging criteria center on incrementality and scrutiny-proof measurement. On the structural risk side, Abed flags that AI-driven search interfaces may directly pressure the "search-like" monetization models currently central to commerce media revenue, requiring platform-level adaptation through 2026 and into 2027.
Why It Matters
Abed's commentary is strategically valuable precisely because Klarna has more skin in this game than a typical juror — and that conflict of interest is the most instructive thing about this announcement. Klarna isn't just observing commerce media's evolution; it's actively building infrastructure to capture the category if incumbent retail media networks stumble. The agentic commerce protocol, the Google Cloud partnership, the AI-extended shopping assistant — these aren't product footnotes. They're a coordinated play to position Klarna as the transaction and discovery layer that sits beneath commerce media, not alongside it. When Abed flags that AI-driven search interfaces will pressure "search-like" monetization models, he's describing a threat to Amazon and Walmart Connect as much as he's issuing a general industry warning. What surface-level coverage misses is the timing pressure this creates for the major retail media networks. The incrementality and standardization argument — which Abed elevates as the industry's central challenge — also happens to be the terrain where challenger platforms like Klarna's can compete most aggressively. If measurement comparability becomes the default expectation, closed-wall networks with proprietary attribution lose their most defensible moat. The incumbents have scale; they don't necessarily have the cleanest proof of value story. For senior executives allocating commerce media budgets through 2026 and into 2027, the real question isn't whether to demand incrementality measurement — that debate is settled. It's whether your current network partners are building toward open comparability or quietly defending opacity. The answer tells you whose infrastructure is worth deepening and whose contract you should be renegotiating now.
The Exploit
Opportunity
Budget owners at brands spending $5M+ annually across retail media networks have a 6-month window to renegotiate contracts from a position of strength. Standardized incrementality measurement is becoming the category expectation—not a premium add-on—and challengers like Klarna are building infrastructure explicitly designed to make closed-wall attribution look indefensible by comparison.
Risk
Retail media budgets locked into multi-year agreements with networks that defend proprietary attribution will face a credibility problem internally by Q4 2026, when board-level scrutiny of marketing ROI will demand proof that spend is generating lift, not just last-click correlation. The executives most exposed are those who renewed without incrementality benchmarks written into their performance terms.
The Move
Before your Q3 2026 budget review, require every retail media network partner to deliver a third-party-validated incrementality report against a control group—and write that requirement into any contract renewal or extension signed between now and August 2026. If a network declines or delays, that refusal is your reallocation trigger. The CMO owns this mandate; it cannot be delegated to a media buyer.
First-Mover Advantage
Gains
Risks
Retail media budgets locked into multi-year agreements with networks that defend proprietary attribution will face a credibility problem internally by Q4 2026, when board-level scrutiny of marketing ROI will demand proof that spend is generating lift, not just last-click correlation. The executives most exposed are those who renewed without incrementality benchmarks written into their performance terms.
Window
Winners & Losers
Winners↑
Incrementality and causal measurement vendors
Abed's elevation of incrementality as the industry's central credibility test — and his explicit framing of it as the benchmark for award-worthy work — accelerates enterprise budget allocation toward vendors who can deliver causal proof rather than correlation. The mechanism is straightforward: as standardised reporting becomes the default expectation across networks, third-party measurement infrastructure becomes the arbiter of which platforms deserve deeper spend. These vendors should be proactively pursuing co-marketing arrangements with challenger commerce platforms and positioning their methodology as the neutral layer that enables cross-network comparability.
Challenger commerce media platforms with open attribution models
Klarna's own trajectory illustrates the opportunity: platforms that lead with transparency, privacy-by-design architecture, and open comparability standards are structurally positioned to absorb budget migrating away from walled gardens as incrementality expectations tighten. The competitive mechanism is that measurement comparability erodes the incumbent advantage of proprietary attribution, levelling the playing field on proof of value rather than scale. Challengers should accelerate third-party measurement integrations and publish standardised incrementality benchmarks through Q2 and Q3 2026 to force the comparison before incumbents adapt.
AI-native creative production and personalisation tools
Abed's explicit callout of AI-accelerated creative production — producing more variations faster, tailored to intent signals rather than demographics — signals that creative automation is moving from experimental to expected infrastructure inside commerce media programmes. Klarna's own deployment serves as a visible proof point that will raise the bar for what brand partners are expected to bring to the table. Vendors in this space should be packaging their offering around commerce media use cases specifically, including SKU-level creative variation and intent-signal targeting, to capture budget flowing into this category through 2026.
Full-funnel media planning and strategy agencies
Abed directly challenges the misconception that commerce media is a lower-funnel, last-click channel, and frames the industry's maturation as a shift toward full-funnel planning and evaluation. This reframes commerce media as a legitimate brand investment requiring the kind of strategic planning historically associated with broadcast and premium digital — territory where full-funnel agencies have established credibility and client relationships. Agencies that move quickly to build commerce media practices with genuine measurement rigour, rather than bolting it onto performance buying desks, are positioned to capture the strategic advisory relationship as brand clients renegotiate network contracts through 2026.
Losers↓
Closed retail media networks with proprietary attribution
The incumbents most at risk are networks whose competitive moat depends on proprietary attribution methodologies that cannot be compared across platforms — precisely the opacity that Abed identifies as the industry's trust problem. As standardised reporting and incrementality benchmarks become the default expectation for Q2 2026 and beyond, these networks face a structural choice between opening their measurement to external validation or defending opacity at the cost of budget share from sophisticated allocators. The defensive move is to get ahead of the comparison by commissioning third-party incrementality studies now and publishing results before the narrative is set by challengers who benefit from the contrast.
Search-dependent commerce media ad formats and monetisation models
Abed explicitly flags that AI-driven search interfaces will pressure the 'search-like' monetisation models currently central to commerce media revenue — and he frames this as a platform-level adaptation challenge running through 2026 and into 2027, not a distant theoretical risk. The mechanism is disintermediation: as AI assistants and agentic commerce protocols handle product discovery and purchase completion, the sponsored placement formats that generate the bulk of retail media revenue lose their surface area. Platforms reliant on these formats should be investing now in intent-signal-driven formats compatible with agentic transaction flows, and piloting integrations with commerce protocols like Klarna's before standardisation locks in competitor-friendly defaults.
Strategic Outlook
Commerce media has been quietly consolidating around a measurement credibility problem for the better part of three years, but 2026 is the first cycle where that problem is actively repricing relationships. The IAB's push toward standardized retail media measurement, accelerated through late 2025, gave buyers the vocabulary to demand comparability — and now they're using it. What's shifted entering Q1 2026 is that incrementality has moved from a sophisticated ask to a baseline expectation, compressing the window for networks still running proprietary attribution as a feature rather than a liability. The structural parallel worth tracking: this mirrors what happened to programmatic display when viewability standards arrived. Scale arguments collapsed quickly once buyers had a shared metric. Retail media's closed-wall networks are now in roughly that same position, except the challengers arriving aren't DSPs — they're transaction-layer platforms with first-party purchase data that predates the retail relationship entirely. Klarna's positioning here isn't incidental. Financial services entering commerce media infrastructure follows travel media's earlier move, and both signal that the category's next competitive pressure comes from entities that own the payment or booking moment, not the browse moment. That's a fundamentally different gravity than Amazon or Walmart Connect is built to resist.