Publicis Commerce's Jill Cruz: Understanding Commerce Media, Advertising's Fastest Growing Category (Video)

Jill Cruz joined Publicis Commerce as Executive Vice President Commerce Strategy in January 2022, already established among the leading experts in the fast-growing commerce/retail media field. But, as she points out in our Legends & Leadership conversation, the first third of her career was focused on more traditional brand advertising, "doing more equity building and creative media planning before I moved into shopper marketing. Shopper marketing," she explains, "evolved out of consumer promotion and I spent quite a few years at great shopper marketing agencies … driving e-commerce. There's a lot of talk about the collapsed [purchase] funnel and I spent most of my career in that siloed world where it was about trade, budgets, shopper marketing budgets, brand budgets and everybody had their own jobs to do." In our conversation, Jill shares how that's changing and while the funnel still exists "the pieces of the funnel are no longer defined by a set of channels or a set of tactics." Her responsibilities have become more complex as "retailers are becoming media companies and moving their solutions up the funnel, and as media companies like TikTok, Meta and NBC are also becoming retailers ... We really need to look at how we're classifying media and impressions."