Comic: Not-So-Secret Sauce

Google won’t have to break up its ads business after being declared an online monopolist. Meanwhile, Amazon faces a lawsuit from the FTC alleging that it charged advertisers more than necessary for ecommerce ads.

Buy-side experts said it’s another example of a Big Tech platform taking advantage of the lack of transparency built into programmatic ad auctions. And they’re not optimistic change is coming.

This week, the Commerce Media Newsletter catches up with a startup from outside the world of data-driven advertising, but with an interesting position when it comes to ecommerce advertising. That’s Clearco, a Canadian fin tech company founded in 2015.

Halo Collar, a dog collar brand with direct-to-consumer origins, is preparing for its retail expansion by honing its first-party data strategy and incrementality measurement.

The company is launching an accelerator program to help tech vendors pitch their solutions in a way that makes sense to advertisers.

TWC is building a monetization model that treats weather as both a contextual and an emotional signal, and it’s using AI sales agents to bring it to market.