Commerce

Sallie, the major issuer of US education loans, is getting into the retail media network business.

Infillion, an ad tech business built on M&A, is back with another acquisition. This time it’s Catalina, a century-old market research and shopper marketing company with roots in physical cash register machines.

“Fully a third of our profit in the most recent quarter was related to advertising and membership income,” Walmart CFO John David Rainey told investors on Thursday.

Companies like P&G, PepsiCo and Colgate-Palmolive are cutting marketing spend as the easiest and quickest way to protect profitability.

Criteo has an optimistic pitch for future growth, but Wall Street doesn’t see the money yet from LLMs, commerce agents and social shopping.

What people need is an independent agent that peers across retailer and is entirely focused on ecommerce services. At least that’s the conclusion driving Wizard Commerce, a personal shopping agent that emerged from beta on Wednesday.

This Wednesday marks the beginning of Hershey’s first major brand marketing campaign since 2018

Retail’s Big Show, the annual NRF event in New York City, was big on agentic commerce, unsurprisingly, as well as influencer and creator marketing, which was an eye-opener.

Fraud is eating into retail profits. A new startup called Pinch AI just launched with $5 million in funding to fight back.

On Wednesday, retail and CPG data company SPINS added a new piece with its acquisition of MikMak, a click-to-buy ad tech and analytics startup that helps optimize their commerce media.

An important part of developing the in-house creative group at HexClad is to prove the return on investment, according to Head of Content Matt Duckor.

People tend to think of digital-native product brands as a single bucket. But there’s a huge difference between companies that are social natives, for instance, rather than an Amazon-based brand.

Shopify launched its latest advertising business line on Wednesday, called the Shopify Product Network.

America’s biggest department stores are changing, and changing fast.

“We just constantly hear how complex it is right now,” Kelly MacLean, Amazon Ads VP of engineering, science and product, tells AdExchanger. “So that’s really where we we’ve anchored a lot on hearing their feedback, [and] figuring out how we can drive even more simplicity.”

“You’ve got to really evaluate your [media] mix almost every day, but particularly when you’re on shelves and on Amazon,” AG1 CMO Paulie Dery, who joined in August 2024, told AdExchanger.

AI agents have infiltrated retail media. At least, that’s how it felt to big Wall Street advertising and tech investors, who brought a sense of existential dread to Criteo’s quarterly earnings call on Wednesday.

PayPal Ads is continuing its new product announcement whirlwind with news that it’s partnering with the commerce media startup Rokt to bring non-endemic advertisers to some PayPal and Venmo post-payment pages.

AdExchanger caught up Milani CMO Jeremy Lowenstein about how the beauty brand fits into mass-market retail, in contrast to DTC and social-based brands.

Retail media has broken through some critical threshold, and is no longer the straightforward digitalization of shopper marketing budgets.

On Tuesday, Amazon DSP announced an expanded integration with satellite radio company SiriusXM.

Retail media is entering what might be called its Socratic phase. The closer we to get to understanding an ad campaign’s real impact and business results, the clearer it is that we have no idea how this thing works.

Criteo announced a partnership with Google Search Ads 360 (SA360), Google’s enterprise search advertising platform, making Criteo the first third-party vendor to integrate with Google for on-site retail media supply.

In June, Marriott launched a new media network designed to connect its customers to relevant brands throughout the travel journey.

This week, the AdExchanger Commerce Media Newsletter spotlights ZeroClick, an ad network for AI chatbot products launched by a group of familiar faces in the world of ecommerce and ad tech.

Product prices and marketing budgets are flip sides of the same coin. But the phase-in effects of tariffs, combined with vicissitudes of global weather and commodity production, challenge that truism.

Volta Media, which is owned by the gas station and energy giant Shell, will be shuttered by November and its network of more than 2,000 charging stations will be dismantled this year.

For a moment, it seemed that beverage aisles and refrigerator sections in chains across the country were cracking open for startups and independent brands to compete with Coca-Cola, Pepsi and Dr Pepper.

Criteo’s Q2 earnings report on Wednesday was marked by flatness.

This year’s Amazon Prime Day event stood out in a couple important ways. One is the blasé results of Prime Day; the other is the guerilla pricing tactics adopted by brands and merchants that sell on Amazon and elsewhere across the web.