Commerce

Three years after launching a retail media network, specialty food retailer The Fresh Market has a print magazine and a new live-stream shopping program.

Hey! This is James Hercher, AdExchanger’s senior editor and commerce industry beat reporter. Welcome to the inaugural dispatch of AdExchanger’s Commerce Newsletter.

The digital commerce agency Blue Wheel and ecommerce marketplace agency Retail Bloom announced their merger on Tuesday. Founded in the metro Detroit area in 2011 and 2015, respectively, Blue Wheel and Retail Bloom will unite under the Blue Wheel banner going forward.

Helping usher Laura Mercier into the metaverse has been one of Salima Popatia’s first projects as Orveon Global’s chief digital officer. But the brand’s December launch of a virtual store is only the beginning of its metaverse journey.

In 2022, retail media grew to include practically any business with a first-party identity graph, purchase data and a claim to ears or eyeballs. Despite the buzz, however, retail media has a long way to go before the category is mature.

Meta Advantage+ is not a new streaming service, despite the “plus.” And it’s not a healthcare plan, though it sounds like one. It’s Meta’s version of a first-party data-based ad platform locked inside the blackest black box any Facebook advertiser has ever known.

Lost in the Sturm und Drang of Q4 (Q for quarantine) 2020, Google introduced a beta program called Performance Max, its first ad product spanning all Google-owned media. Fast-forward to today, and Performance Max has quietly become the fastest growing and potentially most controversial product in the Google portfolio.

As any stateside ’90s kid can attest, backpack brand JanSport reigned supreme in the late ’90s and 2000s. Now, what’s old is new again. Fueled in part by Gen Z’s nostalgia for decades past, “we’ve resurged as America’s number-one backpack,” said Monica Rigali, JanSport’s vice president of global brand management.

The Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday online shopping bonanza was in full effect this year. But it’s hard to make judgements about whether this season is helping buoy retailers and brands as in years past

Advertisers are shifting their holiday campaign strategies this Black Friday and Cyber Week, moving down the funnel in response to economic headwinds. And so we asked the experts: How are inflationary and recessionary worries impacting media plans around Black Friday and Cyber Week?

Founded in 2016, the male grooming company Manscaped started out primarily as a performance marketing engine. The products were simply a way for the brand to use its expertise in social media marketing and direct-to-consumer dynamics. Fast-forward six years, and Manscaped has broadened beyond one product and mobile performance marketing. In addition to launching a […]

Walmart and Target each had a similar warning for investors when they reported earnings this week. The two major US retailers expect a modest Q4 and spoke of early signs that consumers are dramatically changing their shopping patterns (yet again).

The ad tech hits keep coming this earnings season. The latest is Criteo, which reported total revenue of $446.9 million in Q3 2022, down from $508.6 million last year, while net profit in Q3 dropped from $24.2 million in 2021 to $6.5 million.

The Amazon Marketing Cloud, which emerged from beta last year, is at the beating heart of Amazon’s advertising ambitions. Amazon touted the product, which is its answer to a homegrown data clean room, at its Amazon Ads unBoxed conference in New York City on Wednesday.

What do Marriott, Lyft and Lowe’s have in common? All three are non-advertising companies that recently launched their own media platforms. Lowe’s rolled out its One Roof Media Network in October 2021; Marriott announced its travel media network in May; Lyft Media launched in August. Both Marriott and Lowe’s use Yahoo’s ad tech to support […]

Getting cozy with agencies wasn’t always a priority for Criteo, which has direct relationships with more than 20,000 clients. But now that Criteo has commerce and retail media aspirations, it needs to strike agency partnerships, says its CRO Brian Gleason.

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.”

“We saw the rise and fall that can happen if you’re dependent on digital advertising,” said Bryan Porter, Simple Modern’s co-founder and chief ecommerce officer. “It worked really well for us … until it didn’t.” The experience of surfing an online ad wave and then crashing hard on the beach has shaped Simple Modern’s marketing strategy, which is fully in-housed

Two years ago, shortly after the start of the coronavirus pandemic, Nike doubled down on what it refers to as its Consumer Direct Acceleration. Nike wasn’t simply weathering a storm, but taking COVID-19’s worldwide shakeup of consumer buying habits as an opportunity to rethink its business “by expanding our digital advantage, reshaping the marketplace of the future and creating deeper, more direct consumer relationships,” CFO Matthew Friend told investors.

The grocery chain Albertsons in-housed its advertising services and tech business in February, and is still making big changes to the group. “It’s really about owning the tech stack and the product vision,” said Evan Hovorka, head of retail media products.

Sam’s Club, the membership-based retailer owned by Walmart, recently rebranded its advertising business as the Member Access Platform (MAP) as it charts its own course alongside other emerging retail media platforms. The notion of “member access” is what sets Sam’s Club apart from other retailers that are focused entirely on advertising as a way to monetize customers, said Lex Josephs, a VP at Sam’s Club and GM of the MAP business.