For years, commerce media was mostly a retail play. Amazon built it. Walmart built it. Target built it. The pitch was simple: we have shopping data, we sell ads. But when Mastercard stepped into the space last fall, something felt different about the approach.

In October 2025, Mastercard officially launched its Commerce Media Network at Advertising Week New York. At the center of it is Nili Klenoff, the company’s Executive Vice President of Commerce Media and Innovation, who had spent months shaping what this actually looks like in practice.

Not Your Typical Retail Media Play

The numbers behind the launch are hard to ignore. Mastercard’s network processes roughly 160 billion transactions every year, and its Commerce Media offering connects around 500 million opted-in consumers to more than 25,000 brands through direct publisher integrations. Content is delivered in authenticated, brand-safe environments where every publisher partner has been vetted.

What separates this from the usual first-party data pitch is card-linking. It is technology Mastercard has been running for over a decade through its personalized offers business. When a consumer engages with an ad or incentive through a publisher, the offer links directly to their card. That means Mastercard can trace the entire chain from impression through offer to completed purchase, whether that purchase happens online or in a physical store.

“We have the ultimate proof of purchase. That becomes a very powerful value-add to brands.”

Nili Klenoff, EVP Commerce Media and Innovation, Mastercard

For advertisers who are tired of guessing whether their campaigns actually moved the needle, that is a genuinely different proposition. Klenoff has cited returns of 22x for advertisers through Mastercard’s card-linked offer programs, a number that is hard to ignore in any budget conversation.

Built on Infrastructure, Not Hype

Klenoff is careful to frame this not as Mastercard jumping on a trend, but as a natural extension of what the company was already doing. “We took a look at our solution and said, ‘This is really fit for purpose for this moment,'” she told Marketing Brew at CES 2026. “It’s now about taking that and evolving that into a broader value proposition, supporting more kinds of content, not just incentives and discounts, but also digital ads.”

Early publisher partners included Citibank, American Airlines, Microsoft, and WPP. Since then, the network has grown to include Uber, Yahoo, Paramount, and Xsolla, extending Mastercard Commerce Media into mobility, streaming, and gaming environments. In each case, the same principle applies: intent signals from the publisher environment get paired with Mastercard’s transaction intelligence to personalize the experience and measure what actually happened after.

“Data is what we do at Mastercard,” Klenoff said. “It’s in our DNA.”

What Happens When AI Does the Shopping?

By CES 2026, the conversation had shifted. Klenoff was not just talking about commerce media anymore. She was focused on what happens when the shopper disappears from the equation entirely.

“This time last year, it was AI. Now it’s agentic. You can’t get away from it,” she said in a conversation with The Drum. She pointed to a statistic that probably landed harder than most industry benchmarks: over 50% of younger consumers are now going to generative AI for product recommendations, and they trust those recommendations more than their own judgment. The shopping journey, as she put it, has fundamentally changed.

If autonomous AI agents move from recommending products to actually purchasing them on consumers’ behalf, the traditional moment of influence in advertising shrinks dramatically. Most commerce media strategies were built around capturing that moment. Agentic AI could remove the consumer from it completely.

The Agent Is the Audience

Rather than treating this as a threat, Klenoff is positioning Mastercard to be indispensable within it. “We think about agentic as another publishing environment,” she said. “As long as the intent signals can be fed in and the identification for the consumer is there, we can still run our solution and provide value.”

Mastercard is already developing what it calls agentic pay: a system designed to allow AI agents to transact securely on a consumer’s behalf while preserving existing identity verification and consumer protections. The bet is that trust and infrastructure matter more than creative formats when an AI is making the buying decision.

“The agent is the audience,” Klenoff said, “not just the consumer.” That is a significant reframe for the entire industry. Brands will need to be legible and preferred by automated systems, not just by people. And measurement becomes more critical in that world, not less, because when the buyer is automated, brands need even greater confidence about what actually influenced the decision.

A Network Built for What Comes Next

Commerce media still has a lot of proving to do across the industry. But Mastercard’s entry brings something most retail networks cannot offer: a transaction layer that spans nearly every category of commerce, not just one retailer’s checkout page. The card-linking infrastructure, the scale of 160 billion annual transactions, and the focus on closed-loop attribution give it a structural foundation that is genuinely hard to replicate.

Whether that advantage holds as agentic AI reshapes what buying looks like, that is the next chapter. And based on how Klenoff is thinking about it, Mastercard intends to be there for it.