Commerce

Amazon’s Rufus: yet another example of Big Tech pushing AI bots onto its platforms. Plus, pushback against Google search engine monetization.

The Chrome Privacy Sandbox team is stuck within a Catch-22. Plus, why haven’t media buyers bought more into alternative currencies?

Topsort can lean into Moloco’s algorithmic personalization, while Moloco benefits from Topsort’s footprint with local retailers in the US and in Latin America.

Once consumers are ready to travel, they’re often ready to spend on almost everything, from beauty and booze to electronics and streaming services. And that creates a unique opportunity for advertisers to reach a new audience with high intent, says Christine Maguire, global VP of commercial business at TripAdvisor.

Academy Sports and Outdoors, a sporting goods chain founded in 1938, is trying to get trendy.

Upfront negotiations might take longer than normal this year. Plus, Meta is already in hot water with the EU’s new digital regulations.

Amazon is the king of retail media, but others are growing into worthy contenders. Plus: Movies aren’t making many upfront deals.

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.

In today’s newsletter: Mobile and email providers face political blowback if they enforce ad policies; a new analytics startup sets its sights on Amazon attribution; and CFOs and CMOs are more aligned than you might think.

It’s been almost one year since MediaMath went out of business. Two months later, Infillion acquired the assets out of bankruptcy. Now it’s time for the next phase, says Infillion CRO and CMO Laurel Rossi.

The challenges facing digital advertising feel bigger than ever. But when you’re in Cannes, you can’t help but focus on the positives. Here are the six biggest ad industry trends and positive takeaways from this year’s show.

In today’s newsletter: SSPs lead the way on ad tech’s M&A resurgence; Disney rolls back CPMs to court more streaming ad demand; and why dating apps struggle to grow and monetize their audiences.

At the Cannes Lions, generative AI applications for advertising were out in force. Plus: takes from the Croisette on retail media and cookie conspiracies.

United Airlines really wanted everyone who traveled to Cannes this year for the Lions festival to know it has a media network now. Before takeoff on the 7:50 p.m. overnight Saturday flight from Newark Airport to Nice, France, an ad for Kinective Media, which is the name for United’s new media network, played on every […]

In today’s newsletter: Amazon’s argument that advertisers should trust optimization algorithms over alternative IDs; Japan passes an app store antitrust law targeting Apple and Google; and Google Ads ends support for credit card payments.

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.

In today’s newsletter: What the surge in political ad spend on CTV looks like for the end user; Mars Wrigley tries to make gum stick online; and Google neglects Fitbit after mining it for data.

Media governance measures advertisers can put in place to navigate the complexity of brand safety and gain better control of the quality of their media spend.

The New York Times and Instacart are partnering for shoppable recipe videos.

In today’s newsletter United Airlines gets into retail media; why AI fails to catch AI-generated content; and political advertisers flock to X for cheap impressions.

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.

Since launch, 82% of advertisers that buy inventory through the Yahoo DSP have tried Backstage at least once. And buyers are seeing lower CPMs from cutting out SSPs.

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.

Breaking down how incrementality complements multitouch attribution and media mix modeling, and how advances in AI and ML have evolved incrementality measurement beyond A/B testing.

In today’s newsletter: Publishers fear they’ll be excluded from The Trade Desk’s “premium internet”; buyers weigh in on Netflix’s plans to offer an ad server; and PayPal launches an ad network and data brokerage.

RAG is a recently developed process to ingest, chunk, embed, store, retrieve and feed first-party data into AI models. Here’s how to use these tools to inject first-party data into your next AI-enabled campaign.

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.