Commerce

“It’s going to be harder for [indie agencies] to compete,” said Rob Rivenburgh, the CEO of Mars United, who also now leads the Publicis Commerce global group.

Ad industry growth will slow to single-digits next year; consolidation hits the CPG market; and predicting the future of the FTC based on a commissioner’s pitch to the president-elect.

Curation is a reaction to programmatic’s worsening queries-per-second problem, says Permutive’s Joe Root. DSPs are biased toward impressions that have an identifier attached, so SSPs are using curated deal IDs as a stand-in for third-party cookies.

Enjoy this weekly comic strip from AdExchanger.com that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem … 

This year, Black Friday stretched on for days and days. And the retail holidays is evolving in other ways, as online shopping takes over.

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

Personalization and customization are great, but when marketers go overboard with targeting, they don’t cast a wide enough net to attract new customers and foster growth, says JP Jansen, SVP of marketing and CMO for North America at Mars Pet Nutrition.

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.

Black Friday ecommerce continues to surge, mainly on mobile; social platforms pull optimization features for health and beauty brands; and Google’s antitrust lawyers subpoena info about rival AI search startups.

Despite CEO Jeff Green’s denials, the rumors turned out to be true: The Trade Desk has spent the last three years quietly building its streaming OS, called Ventura, to compete with the likes of Roku, Amazon’s Fire TV and Google’s Android.

Dustin Hinz is CMO of Firestone Walker Brewing, which just launched its first non-alcoholic beer line. Now comes the marketing challenge.

Here are 12 essential tips to help advertisers optimize their retail media investments and thrive in this fierce new arena, based on insights from the ANA’s Retail Media Networks Fair.

Is the marketing funnel as we know it officially dead? Variations of that eternal question were posed over and over again to panelists at Paramount Advertising’s Performance Now Summit in New York City on Tuesday.

Forrester released its first SSP wave since 2014 last week, and there’s a surprise. The research firm ranked Google – whose sell-side ad tech platform is facing federal antitrust charges – as a mere challenger.

Why the agency pivot to alternative payment models is good for M&A; Zeta Global responds to a short-seller’s explosive claims; and X sees a mass exodus after the election.

IRIS.TV will remain an independent company, and Viant will push for CTV platforms to adopt its IRIS ID to provide contextual signals beyond what streamers typically share about their ad inventory.

Threads will introduce ads to capitalize on users fleeing X; Perplexity tests ads and sponsored queries; and Amazon pulls the plug on Freevee.

Brands are getting back to basics. They’re rethinking their packaging and trying to figure out how they fit into the new world of retail store shelves. And while they are getting more data-driven, the data is not necessarily for advertising.

Walmart’s latest data play: an app for unlocking barricades on store shelves; training generative AI may rely more on scraping big-name sites than previously thought; and tracking the issues that mattered most to Trump and Harris, based on ad spending.

Nielsen has received accreditation from the MRC for a product that integrates a broadcaster or media company’s first-party streaming data into Nielsen’s TV panel ratings.  Plus, Google launches a curation service that bundles ad inventory within its own Google Ad Manager.

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.

Ad revenue grew 56% YOY even without some of Reddit’s shiny new ad products, including generative AI creative tools and in-comment ads, being fully integrated into its platform.

Google Search dings big-name pubs’ affiliate-link-laden articles; Google’s new audience prospecting guesses user intent from less obvious keywords; and TikTok Shop’s success could finally make social commerce a thing in the US.

The programmatic open marketplace is designed to sustain the business models of ad tech, agencies and consultancies, rather than serving the interests of advertisers, audiences and media owners. It cannot be fixed. It must be rebuilt.

Disney redirects subscribers to its site to avoid Apple’s App Store fee; ad tech IPOs are in a lull, but the tech companies that are going public rely on ads for growth; and a Democratic PAC spent $30 million on Spanish-language ads.

The term “data clean room” has gotten co-opted. Plus, a useful one-pager on the new baseline standards for DTC marketing. 

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

Ari Paparo’s Marketecture acquires another ad-tech publication; Spotify is launching an SSP; and CPG brands turn to “chaos packaging” to stand out among the crowd.

Despite Chrome’s cookie deprecation turnaround, a comprehensive CAPI strategy remains crucial for brands advertising on Meta, LinkedIn and Snap – yet many advertisers are dragging their feet. Why the reluctance?

Airbnb gets one step closer to launching a retail media biz; Google shakes up its ad tech executive team; and streamers struggle to balance ad and subscriber revenues.