Commerce

Chinese advertisers and ecommerce companies have become a force in American shopping. What happens now?

Lauren Newman, a news publishing and affiliate marketing vet, has high hopes for commerce media to turn things around.

Brick-and-mortar retail is blowing it – and their efforts were on full display at the NRF’s Big Show in New York City last week.

Commerce media just went shopping. On Thursday, ecommerce marketing company Rokt acquired customer data platform mParticle for $300 million.

The killer application for generative AI tech in TV advertising right now is very simple: auto-creating videos that small and local businesses can use to run CTV and streaming TV ads.

After more than three years as SVP of retail media at Albertsons, Kristi Argyilan is taking a ride over to Uber to lead its advertising business.

Retail media and tech platforms now represent a return to agency scale dynamics. The proposed Omnicom and IPG merger is the latest example.

AS Beauty has been using the enterprise version of Shopify Shop Campaigns to acquire new customers and only pay for those that convert. Shop Campaigns went GA for all merchants on Wednesday.

Retailers should always have a shopper-first mentality – and sometimes that may mean having to deprioritize their retail media business.

Western Union – which, fun fact, sent its first telegrams across the American frontier in the early 1850s – launched a media network last month that reaches 150 million people.

In the world of online advertising on big walled-garden platforms – Meta in particular – October through November truly is the season of giving. Of giving advertisers ulcers and panic attacks, that is.

Here’s an uncomfortable question for any data-driven advertiser: Is there a good way to measure and attribute marketing campaigns?

In its sales pitches, hands-on-keyboard sessions and during conversations with ad tech vendors and Amazon sellers, Amazon consistently combined its content fortress with AWS and its investments in AI and machine learning.

“I always said, I think we need to change our title, because it’s not the old school shopper marketing,” said Anne Martin, director of shopper marketing for Mondelez International, which owns Oreo, Ritz, and a variety of other snacks.

Perhaps you’ve noticed – How could you not? – that there is massive competition among the largest ecommerce retailers to be the quickest, cheapest option online. But the mid-tier of ecommerce marketplaces are suffering.

Legislative drama notwithstanding, it’s time to look at TikTok Shop as a first potential sign that live online shopping in the US can be, well, a thing.

Most retailers are long past withholding their shopper data from programmatic tech. They prefer the low-hanging fruit. But was that a good decision?

Pacvue has promoted COO Rahul Choraria to chief executive.

Wonderful hadn’t done an out-of-home (OOH) marketing push in more than 15 years. That is, until a week ago, when it began a campaign across six major markets to promote its new no-shell pistachio packs.

Yahoo DSP has new partnerships with the Planet Fitness media network and Rippl, a co-op of regional grocery and convenience store chains, including Wegmans.

In the past year, Baby product and mattress brand Newton Baby has put all its media channels through a new testing regime for incrementality. It was a revelatory experience.

Amazon’s Advertising Services segment is delivering the dough. It generated $12.8 billion last quarter, up by a cool $2 billion year over year.

Q2 was relatively ho-um for Criteo. Its revenue ticked up by just 1%, although the company did move from a net loss of $2 million in the year-ago quarter to a $28 million profit.

In the past couple of weeks, many of the world’s biggest CPG and grocery store brands have reported their latest earnings. One thing is clear: CPG brands are under pressure by retailers to squeeze their margins, lower prices and spend more on ads.

For CFOs and CEOs, we’ve entered a kind of open hunting season on martech SaaS.

Topsort can lean into Moloco’s algorithmic personalization, while Moloco benefits from Topsort’s footprint with local retailers in the US and in Latin America.

Academy Sports and Outdoors, a sporting goods chain founded in 1938, is trying to get trendy.

This week, we’re diving into the most important thing in advertising – the actual creative – and how major ad platforms are well on their way to an era of creative innovation. Actually, strike that. I meant creative desolation.

Incrementality is a retail media term for attribution. It’s the attempt to measure the actual contribution of advertising to a business’ bottom line. But in a market where everything old is new and everything new has been done a thousand times, it’s important to focus on other kinds of incremental gains.

Albertsons is taking that first step into non-endemic advertising next week via a partnership with Rokt to serve ads to people who have already purchased groceries.