Education solutions company Sallie has launched Backpack Media, an education media network that offers marketers access to Gen Z and Gen Alpha students and the families influencing their purchasing decisions across Sallie’s owned properties, the open web, and CTV.

Leading the new division is Marco Steinsieck, a commerce media veteran who previously launched Sephora Media Network and played a key role in scaling Staples Media Network.

• That experience shapes how he views Sallie’s move into the commerce media space.
• “When you're building an ads business, whether it's within a bank or an education services company or a retailer, you're building a new company within this company,” he said. “It is inherently disruptive. It’s like a startup within a big company.”

Turning life stages into media signals

Building a network inside an education solutions company requires both a different data story and a different internal strategy than building one inside a retailer.

While Backpack Media can’t provide the transaction data that is fundamental to retail media, it can provide insights that move beyond past purchases to help brands anticipate future behavior.

“What the brand wants to know is not what you have purchased in the past. They want to know what you're going to purchase in the future,” said Steinsieck.

Built around life stages, Backpack Media leverages Sallie’s education services data, distinct from Sallie Mae financial data, to identify key inflection points, such as when a student is selecting a school, entering graduate studies, graduating or transitioning into the workforce.

• This focus on Gen Z and Gen Alpha adds another layer of opportunity, as they represent the next generation of consumers, earners, and financial decision-makers.
• “Sallie has an incredibly unique combination of education and financial signals that allows us to predict the future trajectory of young adults,” Steinsieck said.

In a market increasingly concerned about automation and agentic commerce compressing margins and commoditizing transactions, Steinsieck argues that predictive signals tied to high-consideration life decisions will hold their value.

“Not all transactions are created equal,” he said, noting that in categories like finance or insurance, “the human is going to stay in the loop.”

Buy-in before revenue

If the data proposition differs from retail, so does the internal work required to stand it up.

“It’s a new business model, a brand new unit economics for the company,” said Steinsieck, noting there was a significant level of education required across leadership and stakeholders to secure buy-in.

Launching an ads business inside a non-media organization means introducing new revenue logic, new incentives and new workflows.

• Steinsieck’s mantra for navigating that tension is simple: Disrupt with grace.
• “It's really important to have strong internal cross-functional relationships, to really understand what their objectives are and bring them along the journey,” he said.

That approach shapes hiring as well. “What I look for are people who are entrepreneurial, driven, who manage ambiguity well, and who are great at change management,” said Steinsieck.

Backpack Media has recruited leaders from established retail media networks and ad tech companies, alongside a substantial data science team tasked with translating education and financial signals into advertiser-ready insights.

Relevance is the business model

Operating inside a larger company also imposes clear guardrails.

“You're a retailer first, or you're a bank first, or you're a hotel first, and the ads business needs to support that,” Stein said.

For Sallie, that means aligning advertising with its core purpose.

“Sallie, the education services company, exists to help power confidence for college students,” Steinsieck said. “So if we know college students are entering a certain stage of their life and they're going to need certain things, having advertising relationships that help bring deals to them is something that can be beneficial.”

That alignment is built into how the business works.

“If you're running a CPC business and you don't serve relevant content to customers, they don't click, your brands don't generate ROAS, and you don't make money,” said Steinsieck. “If advertisers don't drive value for our customers, it’s not good for anybody.”

This was originally featured in the Commerce Media Weekly newsletter. For more marketing insights, statistics, and trends, subscribe here.