Commerce

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.

This week’s dispatch explores the new trend of false advertising class-action suits in the food and CPG industry and how the evolution of online, data-driven retail media could exacerbate the problem.

A growing number of retail media networks are partnering with ad tech intermediaries and each other to manufacture national scale. And you can add regional grocery chains Wegmans and Giant Eagle to that list.

Unfortunately, we seem stuck with our longtime measurement standards, like the trusty old CPM and ROAS. But for change to happen, it must come from within.

What if the new storefront is a person sitting on their couch and scrolling their phone?

Fixating on ROAS makes it harder to figure out how certain parts of a campaign perform, especially now that retail media buys often include other, less performance-focused channels like display and CTV as audience extension.

It’s lawn season – and you know what that means. Scott’s Miracle-Gro commercials, of course. Except this time, spots for Scott’s will be brought to you by The Home Depot’s retail media network.

Sales are way up; ROAS is through the roof across search, social and ecommerce. At least, that’s what the ad platforms say.

Expedia Group, the online travel agency giant, is here for the retail media revolution.

This week, the AdExchanger Commerce newsletter caught up with Mark Heitke, Best Buy Ads vet and new VP of strategy at Symbiosys, a retail media tech biz with a new take on search advertising.

Disney Advertising links up with Walmart Connect to let advertisers match Walmart’s and Disney’s first-party data for audience-based bids on Disney+ and Hulu inventory.

Amazon unveiled three new interactive ad units for Prime Video, all of which are shoppable, ahead of its TV upfront debut.

Criteo split out its retail media segment revenue for the first time during its earnings report on Thursday.

This week, the AdExchanger Commerce Newsletter catches up with Shopify, which, in the past couple of years, quietly became one of the most important players in online advertising, despite rarely being thought of in the category.

American consumers are buying more and more online products directly from Chinese manufacturers. It’s an important change, though many online shoppers are unaware.

Television commerce, or T-commerce, is similar to shoppable TV: both refer to buying something you see on television. But shoppable TV is far more nascent – and also has different implications on attribution.

A booze brand and a “headless commerce” platform walk into a meeting with the CFO. That might sound like the setup for a punchline, but it’s just how mar tech works these days.

Retail media is built on its attribution quality, but real purchases can be gamed by programmatic metrics and create perverse incentives for RMNs to serve ads across low-quality inventory.

This week, we’re looking at retail media but from a different point of view: the Wall Street perspective.

Adopting modern data-driven and ad tech tools is a big shift for a regional grocer like Dierbergs Markets, that wants to remain a grocer – not become a technology company.

Topsort raised $20 million, with plans to seize the 2024 opportunity for post-cookie ad tech.

Don’t get me wrong – Walmart is going to sell a lot of Vizio TVs. But its bigger interest in Vizio stems from data and advertising.

Wall Street wanted profits. Big Tech delivered. That was the case for Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple and – more than any other US tech giant – Amazon.

Conagra-owned brand Birds Eye brings a new approach to online video, social shopping and first-party data.

ASICS is testing data clean rooms and other cloud-based advertising solutions. It shows why vendor and channel tests are important, but not for the faint of heart.

Planet Fitness is hiring an in-house ad sales team to win agency and advertiser budgets for its omnichannel media netw … Wait, what? That’s right. The gym chain has an RMN now.

Two of Salesforce’s new AI-powered tools are nearly ready for prime time: one for segment creation and another to help retailers coordinate the pricing of promotions to different audiences across channels.