Fragmented commerce is costing brands more than they think

Summary

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Podcast Summary: "Fragmented commerce is costing brands more than they think"

The Commerce Collective Podcast
Host: Emma Irwin (Flywheel Digital)
Guest: Mike Feldman, SVP of Commerce at Flywheel
Date: July 22, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode centers on the rising challenge of fragmentation within brand commerce — where more consumer touchpoints, increasingly niche products, and separate internal teams are creating operational and measurement headaches for brands. Host Emma Irwin and Flywheel's Mike Feldman discuss how consumer journeys now span multiple platforms and devices, while legacy brand structures remain disjointed, leading to wasted spending, duplicated efforts, and missed growth opportunities. Key solutions and practical steps toward a unified commerce approach are explored.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. How Did We Get Here? The Roots & Reality of Fragmentation

[01:34 – 04:07]

• Fragmentation defined: Not just more channels, but a disconnect between fast-changing consumer behaviors and slower-evolving brand structures.
• Explosion of choice: Feldman illustrates with the jump from 3 to 150 types of milk in stores; niche and specialty products abound because of the "endless shelf" of e-commerce.
• Media complexity: Shifts from simple, mass-market approaches (“everyone watching a national TV spot”) to “crazy” levels of digital and retail media, with every consumer using multiple platforms at once.
• Bottleneck for brands: “As marketers, at the end of the day, we only got so many dollars, we only got so many hours, and there's all these different crazy things we can do.” (Feldman, [03:32])
• Why fragmentation matters: Brands now face "a boiling point" where organizing and orchestrating all these touchpoints is overwhelming.

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2. Outdated Structures & Hidden Costs

[04:07 – 06:24]

• Legacy thinking: Brands still plan and budget based on old divisions (brand vs. retail media, different briefs, incentives, KPIs).

• Disconnected teams: Even within brands, media, sales, and commerce teams often don’t speak the same language or share goals—sometimes even have conflicting bonus structures.

• The real cost: Slower decisions, duplication, inconsistent messaging, missed demand, and poor consumer experience.

• Tangible example: Frequency management. Brands oversaturate individual consumers with identical ads across platforms, while underexposing new or high-potential audiences—wasting billions.

  “You could hit the same consumer 30 times on Amazon, 30 times on Walmart, 30 times on DoorDash, on Instacart, on TikTok, on Meta...we’re seeing about 30 to 35% of wasted impressions by not managing frequency holistically.”
  — Mike Feldman ([06:24])

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3. The Data Paradox: More Isn’t Always Better

[08:13 – 13:22]

• From John Wanamaker to today: “Half of my advertising dollars are wasted. The trouble is I don't know which half.” ([08:13])

• Data tools exist: The growth of clean rooms, unified IDs (“Axiom where we have 2.6 billion IDs”) allows brands to track consumers and their actions more precisely.

• But alignment matters: More data and dashboards add little value unless teams are unified around the same questions, KPIs, and direction.

  “I think where brands ... are not struggling for data, they’re struggling for direction. …Don’t set the scene, set the direction.”
  — Mike Feldman ([13:35])

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4. The Case for Unified Objectives and Collaboration

[09:20 – 11:43]

• Real-world team divide: Feldman recounts time at Georgia Pacific, where sales and brand teams mistrusted each other’s motives.

• Simple solution, underutilized:

  1. Get everyone in the same room for open, direct debate about business priorities and goals.
  2. Align incentives to common, cross-functional KPIs—not to channel-specific outcomes.

  “That is objectively insane. At the end of the day, everyone works for the same company.”
  — Mike Feldman ([09:55])

• Framework for action: Start from “what’s keeping you up at night,” define a business case, set KPIs that track back to that case, and only then look at how data or tools can solve the real problem.

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5. What KPIs Truly Matter?

[11:43 – 13:22]

• The ultimate KPIs: “Wall Street doesn’t care about your ROAS, they don’t care about your CPCs—they care about sales, share, profit. That is it.”

  — Citing Patrick Miller, paraphrased by Feldman ([12:01])

• Commerce data wins: Use metrics that most closely correlate to sales, share, and profit—commerce data unifies the picture across the journey.

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6. Practical Steps and the Human Element

[15:14 – 17:48]

• Bring it to life: Feldman shares a Danone case study—using commerce and consumer data to spot underperformance, then uniting messaging across traditional and emerging channels (social, creators, retail media).
• Start simple, act together:
  • Form a cross-functional group with a clear, shared objective.
  • Share key learnings regularly (“What are the two to three things we’re learning this week, this month?”).
  • Allow keywords or creative wins to inform other tactics (e.g., successful social concepts feed into retail product pages).
  • “There’s also the human element—Let’s all get in a room, discuss how we want to work together, break down problems, and come up with an action plan.”

  — Mike Feldman ([17:47])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On reaching the “boiling point” of fragmentation:
  “There is just so much fragmentation out there. ... How can we start orchestrating and make sense of all the madness?” ([03:47])
• On the business cost:
  “You were talking about brands wasting billions of dollars...retail media is $100 billion industry...if you’re not integrating that with brand media, you’re wasting 30% of your spend.” ([06:24])
• Simple but underused advice:
  “One, get everyone in the room together. ... The other one...aligned incentives.” ([10:12])
• On KPIs:
  “Wall Street doesn't care about your ROAS...they care about sales, share, profit. That is it.” ([12:01])
• Data isn’t the answer alone:
  “Don’t set the scene, set the direction.” ([13:42])

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:04–01:34: Host sets up the modern commerce challenge—fragmentation vs. connected consumer behavior
• 01:34–04:07: Feldman describes the journey from mass-market to multichannel, fragmented commerce
• 06:24–08:13: Feldman quantifies wasted spend via frequency mismanagement
• 09:20–11:43: Practical example on the power of cross-functional teamwork and shared KPIs
• 12:01: The “sales, share, profit” KPI hierarchy
• 13:35–15:08: Why more dashboards mean more confusion, not always better direction
• 15:14–17:48: Danone case study, practical steps for breaking down silos
• 18:34–19:24: Rapid fire wrap-up: Clean room strategy, TikTok shop as growth area, the need for earlier commerce team inclusion in planning

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Rapid-Fire Q&A: Building Mastery in 2026

[18:34 – 19:24]

• One habit brands should build: “Master clean room strategies.” (Feldman, [18:34])
• Hidden growth area: “Don’t sleep on rising marketplaces like TikTok shop.” (Feldman, [18:40])
• One key KPI question: “If you had to pick one single KPI and goal, what would it be and what needs to be true to get there?” (Feldman, [18:53])
• Who needs to be in the room early: “Commerce people need to get earlier in the brand meeting discussions...not brand then commerce—start at the same time.” (Feldman, [19:04])

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Tone & Concluding Thought

The conversation balances urgency and optimism, recognizing both the overwhelming complexity brands face—and the pragmatic steps, both digital and human, to overcome fragmentation. Feldman consistently advocates for holistic thinking, cross-team alignment, and putting business objectives ahead of channel silos.

Key takeaway: Fragmentation isn’t just a technical or data problem—it’s an organizational and strategic one. The brands that win will be those who master both cross-functional collaboration and the smart application of their data, all rooted in serving the connected consumer journey.

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Next episode: A deeper dive into “total commerce” and the creative side of fragmentation with Flywheel’s Chief Creative Officer.

Whitepaper referenced: “The Big Shift” — linked in episode description.

Transcript

[Mike Feldman]

Foreign

[Podcast Host]

commerce is more connected than ever for consumers, but more fragmented than ever for the brands trying to reach them. Consumers discover products through creators, AI, retail media, social feeds, marketplaces and stores, often all on the same journey. But inside many organizations, the teams responsible for those moments are still working across separate budgets, separate briefs, separate KPIs and separate dashboards. That is the challenge at the center of Flywheel's newest Big Shift white paper, how brains can move from managing fragmentation to mastering it. In this episode of the Commerce Collective podcast, we've covered some of the paper's core themes with Mike Feldman, SVP of Commerce At Flywheel, we talked about what fragmentation really means, where it creates hidden costs, why more data has not made measurement any easier, and what brands can do now to start building a more connected commerce model. And this is only part one. Next month, we'll continue the conversation with Phil Camerota, Flywheel's chief Creative officer, to dig deeper into what we mean by total commerce and the impact of your creative efforts and how fragmentation shows up at the shelf. Last thing, you can of course download the full Big Shift whitepaper in the episode description. Okay, let's get into it. Before we can talk about how brands solve fragmentation, we have to define what it actually is. It's easy to think of fragmentation as more channels, more platforms, or more retailers to manage. But the bigger issue is what happens when consumer behavior moves faster than the operating models built to support it. So how did we get here from a world of a few media channels and simple shelves to one where consumers have nearly endless choices?

[Mike Feldman]

I love the question. And again, this has been top of mind not only just in recent conversations this week, but if, if I really honestly think about the last 10 years of my career, it has been getting progressively more fragmented in our industry. Like if you think about to the original days of media, you would have a big national TV spot. Everyone would be sitting around their TVs every single night. You would literally trip over the product in store with a sea of orange tide or a sea of, you know, whatever it was because of distribution. And that is how consumers discovered products and bought ultimately it was a very streamlined thing. There was a couple media channels, couple of options on shelf. That was it. Over the last again several years, decades you have on one side of it, consumers are getting more choices than ever before. You think about like fragmentation. There used to be three different kinds of milk in a grocery store. There are now 150 different kinds of milk at grocery stores on average. Like it is exploded. You think about the hydration category, it's not like you can just do the hydration anymore. You can now get like L theonine in there. You can get magnesium. Like, it is just crazy sodium. All these different things. There's so many fragmentation. Just products, as consumers have gone more niche with E commerce has really enabled this endless shelf and endless distribution on the other side. And I am probably guilty of this, I work at an advertising agency. But we have seemed to make this whole media thing incredibly complicated. On one side of it, obviously, consumers have changed their behaviors dramatically. You know, we see people on their phones all the time. Like, even if the family is centered around that same television experience, in most cases they're also on their phone or also on something else. Even the choices we're doing, like a lot of people are on TikTok or in meta or they're shopping on Amazon or Walmart and we just have these unlimited choices. And so that has created all this fragmentation. That has been great because that's what consumers have asked for. However, as marketers, at the end of the day, we only got so many dollars, we only got so many hours, and there's all these different crazy things we can do.

[Podcast Host]

And.

[Mike Feldman]

And so we've reached this just boiling point in our industry and why we were so excited to write the big shift because it has gotten so ridiculous. There is just so much fragmentation out there. And so probably one of the most common questions I get asked by brands today is how can we start orchestrating and make sense of all the madness

[Podcast Host]

if consumer behavior has changed so much? The next question is obvious. Why are so many brands still organized around the old model? The problem is not always a lack of strategy. Sometimes it is the structure around the strategy.

[Mike Feldman]

Too often organizations plan based off their historical norms. Like, even as I think about it today, like we have so many teams where we're talking to different clients for brand media versus retail media. Not only talking to different clients, they have different briefs, different KPIs. And even on the brand side, they literally have different bonus and incentive structures. So, like, they want the media to do different things and drive different outcomes for their own personal incentives. That is more of a legacy structure because you had these teams that did brand, you had these teams that did retail, but that operates in a world that does not have a connected data ecosystem. Again, like we've created all this fragmentation on the other side, data and technology has caught up. We're talking about clean rooms, we're talking about single IDs, like Axiom where we have 2.6 billion IDs in consumers that is a third of the entire world's population. And so just these ridiculous data sets and clean rooms to be able to better connect this across all those fragmented places. And so that's one where I think brands really need to think about where it is going versus how things were structured historically. Because I think if we all truly thought about it, it doesn't matter if it's brand media or retail media. It's I want every dollar to drive the most possible value regardless at the end of the day. And I think that's where we're ultimately trying to solve with the orchestration is not be really good at Amazon and Walmart and brand and TV and social and search. It's have a holistic marketing approach that is going to deliver more efficiently and effectively than ever before.

[Podcast Host]

So what does fragmentation actually cost? There are a lot of ways to answer that. Slower decisions, duplicated work, inconsistent messaging, missed demand and disconnected consumer experiences. But Mike gives one example that makes the cost very tangible. Frequency. When every channel is planned separately, the same consumer can be overexposed again and again while other high potential consumers are underexposed often.

[Mike Feldman]

The first example I will give to any brands here, and you know, I wouldn't say it's like even the biggest offense or whatever, but this one is just the one that it seems so obvious that once you see it you can't unsee it. And it's around frequency management. And so again I'll go to so you think about brand media, retail media, and even in retail media There are now 300 different commerce media networks. And so you could hit the same consumer 30 times on Amazon, 30 times on Walmart, 30 times on DoorDash, on Instacart, on TikTok, on Meta, and often. And we see this all the time at Flywheel because we have so much commerce Data by impression30 if someone is not going to buy the product, they're probably not going to buy it. 31, 32 and beyond. And so when we start to look at frequency holistically and you start to be like all right, by impression 30, if they're not going to buy, we're just going to stop sending ads to that consumer. Like we give up, they don't want us, it's okay. And so when we start to do that and then we reinvest into new high potential audiences, audiences that are underexposed to our advertising message, that is where we see the ability to eliminate a ton of waste. And when I say a ton of waste in A lot of cases we're seeing about 30 to 35% of wasted impressions by not managing frequency holistically. And so you were talking about brands wasting billions of dollars if we think retail media is $100 billion industry, and I believe if you're not integrating that with brand media, you're wasting 30% of your spend. I think I can find about $30 billion of wasted spend in our industry.

[Podcast Host]

Think about it. It's pretty annoying when you as a consumer see the same ad over and over and over again, right? And for this audience, you know, it is just wasted spent. It is budget that could have been used to reach a different consumer, support a different moment, or capture demand somewhere else in the journey. So what's the solve?

[Mike Feldman]

That's one that always resonates with brands the most because really, I think everyone believes we are wasting spend in some way. I mean, this has been since John Wanamaker. You know, half of my advertising dollars are wasted. The trouble is I don't know which half. We can solve that through fragmentation. We can solve that through tracking the same ideas to your exact point. You are not different people. On YouTube and TikTok, you're Emma. And so to be able to track you again on an ID level and then where it gets even more powerful, and again, why I sort of work on the Flywheel side of things is not just tracking you across all those channels, but then where did you ultimately take an action? And so it's like, hey, we're able to now track exposure across all these different things. Where did you see ads? What actions did you take? And then ultimately, did you buy the product? Where did you buy the product? Did you continue to buy the product or did you shift? Like, that's the kind of data we can unlock with commerce.

[Podcast Host]

Once brands recognize the cost of fragmentation, the next question is where to start before brands jump to the most advanced tools they need to get the right people aligned around the same business process priorities.

[Mike Feldman]

I did a, a client session and so we were talking about sort of the future of commerce. And my topic is around state of the industry. And so I was talking about fragmentation even on the brand side. So like, before my time at Flywheel, you know, back, back when I was a, a young lad, I used to sell toilet paper on Amazon. So I worked for Georgia Pacific selling Angel Soft Bronnial, all the, the great stuff. And when I started in the organization, I was in truly one of the first ever retail media roles in the industry. This was back in like 2013. And so I so distinctly remember talking to the brand teams. And the brand teams were like, hey, I'm excited you're here. I am worried you're going to be a little too aligned to the sales organization. And then when I talked to the sales team, they were like, hey, I'm glad you're here. Like, love your skill set. I'm worried you're going to be too aligned to the brand side of the organization. And so that is objectively insane. At the end of the day, everyone works for the same company. And so I had this conversation with them and they're like, so like, how do we actually solve that? How do we all plan it together? And I was like, I know this is going to sound basic, but it's really going to be two things. One, get everyone in the room together. That brand was not doing that today. They were like sending things at the same time, but really they were talking past each other. There was no moment where everyone got together to debate what is the priorities and goals of the business. So like one, get everyone together so they're hearing the same information and understanding the same energy. Like, I feel like there is a big piece of like being in the room versus just sending emails and so having that direct conversation as a group. The other one, and this is the most important one, is those aligned incentives. And so I will always say is like, I know they're going to have different things at the end of the day, but the more they can get to a tight group of defined KPIs that are going to benefit both parties, the better off they will be. And that was, frankly, my solve at Georgia Pacific back in the day was it wasn't trying to get the brand team to think about the sales, sales to brand. It was building a better business case where they both understood where they were going to find value. That is how we solve a lot of this, by getting everyone to row in the same direction. And I know that sounds basic, but frankly, we're not doing it today. And with the advancements in technology, we're getting better data to build better business cases to get people to move in that direction. So I am optimistic. We are right on the precipice of solving this.

[Podcast Host]

Fragmentation gets reinforced by what teams are measured against. If every team is optimizing toward its own channel metric, business can end up with a lot of individual wins that don't really end up to stronger growth. So I asked Mike which KPIs matter most when brands are trying to move toward longer term, more connected performance?

[Mike Feldman]

I think I'M going to quote Patrick Miller on this one. He may be familiar to this podcast and program, but he would say, yeah, he would say sales share in profit. So at the end of the day, like Wall street doesn't care about your ROAS, they don't care about your CPCs, they don't care about this, that or the other thing. They care about sales share, profit. That is it. Now to your question on the KPIs, sales share and profit are not necessarily leading indicators. Those are longer term metrics. And so essentially at the end of the day, we're trying to create better and better metrics that are going to correlate to sales share and profit. And that's frankly why I've been invested and leaned into retail media, because we have actual commerce data that correlates to those things. I'm not as particular on the exact KPI and how it's calculated and I can give you recommendations based on the individual business. But the overarching thing I would say for brands is that they should be thinking about using commerce data to improve their decision quality. Again, commerce data is going to correlate to sales share and profit. Those are commerce metrics. And so where are you doing things like analyzing audiences, analyzing creative, analyzing channels, tactics with commerce data to then better correlate that to sales share and profit? I think if you are thinking about it in that lens, you are generally moving in the right direction.

[Podcast Host]

More data, however, does not automatically mean better decisions. In fact, more dashboards can sometimes make fragmentation worse if teams are not aligned on the questions that they're trying to answer. So where do brands start?

[Mike Feldman]

You know, I think one of the most common conversations I have with brands today is that they have access to a ton of data. Like they have more dashboards and more data than ever before. I think where brands and agencies and everyone in our industry is not struggling for data, they're struggling for direction. And so, you know, I talk a lot internally about like, don't set the scene, set the direction. And so I think that's where we need to be better as agency partners. Like our clients are going to see a ton of data. We build tools and technology for the last decade to help separate signal from noise. So where are those areas of opportunity where they can grow? And so, you know, I think for the brands, the more specific into going back to your question of like, what questions can they be asking? One of the things I always ask is like, what is keeping you up at night? Because that's one where like, what are the issues you're trying to solve and then once you know what you're trying to solve, then what is the business case that needs to be made to solve that? What are the KPIs that then drive against the business case and then how are you impacting those things that then drive the KPIs in the business case? And so you always sort of work your way back from there. But I think, I think the tighter you can get on sort of what the goals are and all of that. Now I will say at the same time of the sort of trial and awareness we have reached also to point where data is getting better return on consumer full funnel advertising and analytics, we are now better at calculating sort of what ultimately drives that conversion at the end of the day.

[Podcast Host]

To wrap up this conversation, I asked Mike for one practical step that brands need to take right now.

[Mike Feldman]

There are certainly a few and again I had mentioned a couple of these earlier, but I think the more that you can rally the team together early and help set a really tight, clear direction. So within the big shift, we actually, we had an amazing case study with our partners at Danone and I think they are a really good example of bringing this together. You know, they looked at sort of the commerce data that they, they saw that they were struggling in the category a little bit. At the same time they were looking at consumer behaviors, consumers were struggling, they were under economic pressure. People couldn't afford necessarily going to a Starbucks anymore, but they still wanted that luxury of that sort of home barista type experience. And so they use a lot of those insights both on the consumer side as well as the commerce side. So like where were the trends in the category and where were the trends of the consumers to then marry into this insight of hey, we wanted to do this home Resta campaign and so really help educate consumers. That then means they're going to have to do things across a lot of different areas. So that means educating actual consumers, which we recommend. And I would definitely go into like think about where consumers are discovering things. It's social, affiliates, creators, AI, those are not necessarily retail media channels. At the same time as those content and assets were being produced, the team from a like pure connected standpoint and this is how we think about total commerce. It's not just, hey, we're going to do these assets and create them, but we're going to take those same winning assets and then bring them into retail environments like our retail PDPs and things like that. And so that's where then the consumer is able to See that same experience across multiple channels from a, from a creative standpoint where we then take it to the next level and this is where we're going to start. Solving fragmentation is with IDs so then being able to track that same consumer and how they interact and where and how they ultimately convert and so long winded answer of your question. But ultimately I would start with a core group with a really defined set of goals and objectives. And then I think one thing that we need to get more accustomed to is frankly sharing insights and information. Like I'm a big fan of like what are the two to three things that you're learning this week, this month? Getting together with cross functional teams because you know there might be a new keyword that then drives a creative insight. There may be a great creative that then needs to be applied to a pdp. And so so much of you know we can break down fragmentation with data and technology and AI, but there's also the human element of like let's all get in a room, discuss how we want to work together, break down problems and come up with an action plan.

[Podcast Host]

Fragmentation is not just connecting all of your dashboards. It is connecting the work, the insight, the creative, the retail environment, the media, the measurement and the teams responsible for each of those moments. And in the full big shift white paper that is where we start to get into total commerce. A model built around connecting strategy execution and measurement around the consumer. We will go deeper on that in next month's episode with Phil Camerona where we'll about talk about creative commerce, how creative needs to work harder across the full journey and why the shelf is where fragmentation often becomes the most visible. To close this episode we ended with a quick rapid fire on what brands need to be building right now, where they should look for growth and who needs to be in the room earlier. One habit brands should build in 2026 to head toward mastering fragmentation, I think

[Mike Feldman]

brands need to master clean room strategies.

[Podcast Host]

Boom. One place brands should look for hidden

[Mike Feldman]

growth is brands are going to see outsized growth obviously in E commerce. But I would not sleep on rising marketplaces like TikTok shop.

[Podcast Host]

One question every brand leader should ask their team.

[Mike Feldman]

If they had to pick one single KPI and goal, what would it be and what needs to be true to get there?

[Podcast Host]

I like it. One team that needs to be in the room earlier for commerce planning would

[Mike Feldman]

be the actual commerce team. The amount of times I could tell you that the commerce team was the last people invited. No, I. It's actually I would answer the question differently. I think Commerce people need to get earlier in the brand meeting discussions. Typically it starts brand, then commerce. I think it needs to start at the same time, and that is where we're going to see the biggest impact.

[Podcast Host]

And that wraps up another episode of the Commerce Collected podcast. When teams, KPIs, data and execution are disconnected, brands waste, spend, miss, demand, and make slower decisions. But the opportunity is just as clear to move from managing fragmentation to mastering it. Thank you to Mike for today's insights and be sure to tune in next month. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.