Commerce

Google, and every other ad tech company, is trying to figure out how to deliver personalized marketing without being creepy or violating a privacy policy. “First-party data is imperative,” said Michael Burke, managing director of Google’s branded luxury apparels business, at the IAB Tech Lab’s Brand Disruption Summit in New York City on Wednesday. “But the fallacy is the idea that [first-party data] needs to be used for one-to-one marketing.”

Now that on-demand delivery service Gopuff has an ad platform business, it’s become an unlikely springboard to help creators promote and distribute their brand ventures.

“We realized that there was a whole universe of travel consumer that was applicable to a number of non-endemic categories as well,” said Adam Ochman, TripAdvisor’s global head of brand head of marketing solutions and co-leader of the new Wanderlab in-house creative studio.

Merkle’s retail and consumer goods group has become a testbed for multiple other verticals. Although people tend to think of retail advertising from the perspective of grocery store chains and major CPG brands (Walmart, Target, Kroger and the brands they carry), these days the “retail media” category includes a host of new entrant: Best Buy, Marriott, Lyft, Uber, craft goods store Michael’s.

Kroger Precision Marketing, the grocer’s advertising and data business, announced an expansion into CTV and video inventory channels. “It’s critical to … move into these channels that are increasing with respect to where advertisers are investing their dollars,” Kroger SVP Cara Pratt told AdExchanger.

The 2022 Inc. 5000 list was published on Tuesday, and although its purpose is mostly for marketing (companies pay for inclusion, after all), it is a useful benchmark for tracking the startup ecosystem.

Advertising may be just a fraction of Walmart’s overall revenue – but it’s a nerve center for growth. One might wonder why advertising and other businesses that appear marginal to Walmart’s current revenue makeup, such as third-party online marketplace sellers and subscription memberships, are front and center for the company right now.

DTC brands are struggling to get by without the Facebook ad engine. Legacy brands are flummoxed by ecommerce. One company that’s hoping to split the difference is RoC Skincare, which spun out of Johnson & Johnson and was acquired by the private equity firm Gryphon in 2018.

There’s a disconnect between those ad buyers in the trenches of online advertising and their own corporate leaders up the C-suite, who are accustomed to determining marketing group budgets based on ROI and other basic advertising KPIs that, frankly, are going haywire right now. One way to deal with that disconnect is to add someone who speaks both languages, as it were.

Commerce and creator monetization are Pinterest’s two main priorities right now, said Jeremy King, the company’s SVP and head of engineering. King, who is also the former CTO of Walmart’s ecommerce business – he joined Pinterest in 2019 – said that the convergence of creator revenue potential with social media-based shopping and product discovery by consumers “will make Pinterest functional, versus purely inspirational.”