Commerce

One retail search startup, Symbiosys, which launched last year, is trying to clean up the clutter with an idea it calls collaborative bidding

According to emails seen by AdExchanger that were sent to Amazon customers this week, Amazon is officially naming integration partners to offload clients of the Sizmek ad suite, now the Amazon Ad Server.

Agencies will keep testing cookie alternatives, devising first-party data strategies and exploring commerce media in 2024.

Over the past couple of years, thousands of retail industry trends have been flying around like loose threads. But, through it all, one fact stands above all other mere trends: to the biggest go the spoils.

MikMak, an ecommerce ad analytics company that began as an online add-to-cart specialist, is figuring out more and more how to get things in a physical shopping cart.

Last month, Cars.com – a 25-year-old Chicago-based automotive company that started out in the digital newspaper ads business – launched an RMN for auto advertisers.

There are signs of soft consumer spending this holiday season, and retailers and big online marketplaces are pushing harder than ever to bring down prices and promote discounts.

For many, the holidays start with the post-Thanksgiving shopping weekend. For me, holiday traditions begin in late October, when the Meta ad platform goes haywire. 

As third-party cookies disappear, advertisers can rely on retail data to target consumers, said The Trade Desk’s Ben Sylvan at Night Market’s eCommFronts event in New York City last week.

On Amazon’s earnings call last week, CEO Andy Jassy said the company has “barely scraped the surface” of its advertising business potential. Generating $12 billion in ad revenue last quarter doesn’t seem like “barely” scratching the surface. But Jassy’s right – Amazon Ads is just getting started.

On Monday, Omnicom entered the ecommerce marketplace services space in a big way with an $835 million deal to buy Flywheel Digital.

NCSolutions, leader of the old guard of shopper marketing data suppliers, has revamped its go-to market model, culminating this year with a new clean room data product, Insights Stream, which takes the company’s in-store shopping receipts data to the cloud.

DTC brands bring sharpened audiences and keyword targeting to search-based grocery platforms. But can they beat the CPG giants at their own game?

As ecommerce grows – and advertisers become increasingly wary of proxy measurement – newer metrics are emerging to help buyers better understand how ad spend affects their bottom line.  

Bryan Gildenberg of The CPG Guys, a brand and retail industry podcast with about 24,000 LinkedIn followers, talks Amazon, Instacart and product discovery.

To tap into its first-party data, The Container Store extended its relationship with Epsilon by choosing Epsilon’s self-service digital CDP.

Shopify Audiences debuted last year with only Google and Meta. In January, Pinterest was added to the mix. Now TikTok, Snap and, notably, Criteo will be able to plug into Shopify for modeled data.

Some form of retail media standardization seems inevitable at this point. But retail media campaigns defy the notion of standardization.

Pacvue’s Melissa Burdick talks about the growing role of automation in commerce, the grocery wars and retail media.

Flywheel Digital, a digital commerce company for enterprise brands, released a feature that gives brands a clearer view of their customer lifetime value (CLTV).

Samantha Bukowski, who leads GroupM Nexus Commerce as global head of commerce, talks social commerce, retail media, AI and how all media has become performance media.

Instacart’s S-1 makes more references to advertising than it does to “delivery,” “pickup” or “CPG.”

On Tuesday, Surfside, a cannabis-focused data and marketing platform with its own CDP and DSP, rolled out its commerce media platform nationwide.

Publicis Groupe Chief Commerce Strategy Officer Jason Goldberg talks commerce trends, how he got into commerce and his podcast, “The Jason & Scot Show.”

How will gen-AI content resonate – or not – with consumers? That’s the big question, according to Todd Hassenfelt, Colgate-Palmolive’s ecommerce director.

Amazon crushed its quarterly earnings report on Thursday evening, increasing its market cap by more than $100 billion overnight – and it did so with a major assist from its advertising business.

In just two years, Triple Whale became a popular tool for Shopify merchants and social-based ecommerce sellers. But it did so by getting its data visualization and analytics service into people’s hands at ridiculously low rates.

The aptly named Oddity Tech, an Israeli DTC brand operator, doesn’t fit neatly in one category. It’s a skincare and cosmetics seller, that aims to be a tech and data brand.

On Tuesday, PubMatic entered the crowded retail media space with the launch of a self-service ad platform for commerce media called Convert.

This week, we’re digging into the DTC biz. Not the metrics or the paid media, exactly, but the information and personal support systems that have grown up as people in the industry experienced wild ups and downs of both business and personal well-being.