Commerce Media

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

In the past year, Baby product and mattress brand Newton Baby has put all its media channels through a new testing regime for incrementality. It was a revelatory experience.

Digital-native brands need to figure out how to win in retail shelves. They’re finding it difficult, to say the least.

In the past couple of weeks, many of the world’s biggest CPG and grocery store brands have reported their latest earnings. One thing is clear: CPG brands are under pressure by retailers to squeeze their margins, lower prices and spend more on ads.

The FTC is ordering data from eight companies, which Commissioner Lina Khan describes as part of a “shadowy ecosystem of pricing middlemen,” in pursuit of visibility into “surveillance pricing.”

For CFOs and CEOs, we’ve entered a kind of open hunting season on martech SaaS.

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

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.

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.

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

In today’s newsletter: Ad blocking is getting integrated into web browsers; why Reddit needs to diversify its advertiser base; and how big media’s affiliate marketing tactics crowd specialist publishers out of search.

Commerce media is now among the fastest-growing areas of the ad industry. At the start of 2024, AdExchanger partnered with Fluent to survey more than 150 decision-makers from leading brands, agencies, and publishers serving a range of industry sectors. The results of that survey are part of a new report that provides key insights, including […]

Advertisers are turning the spigot back on. And PubMatic’s investments are paying off. The SSP reported 14% year over year revenue growth in Q4, powered by 9% growth in display.

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.

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.

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

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.  

Is the programmatic advertising industry in a rut? Maybe just call it a midlife crisis, says JiYoung Kim, president for North America at GroupM Nexus, because there are bright spots – namely, retail media.

The US ad market will be boring next year. In a good way. Brian Wieser predicts stabilization in 2024. But if you double-click on his numbers, there are several interesting – and somewhat disturbing – trends to note.

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.

PubMatic reported meager YOY revenue growth in Q2, up just a smidge to $63.3 million from $63 million in Q2 of last year.

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

“Performance marketing and growth hacking ruined a generation of startups,” according to Rent the Runway co-founder and CEO Jennifer Hyman.

Amazon accounts for more than 40% of retail media’s multibillion-dollar total addressable market. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a big opportunity to scale retailer audiences across the open internet, says Criteo CEO Megan Clarken.

American retailers now see themselves as media companies. But in their publisher guise, retailers are in a strange and giddy situation.

Retail media networks overall still have a ways to go before they’re able to satisfy several basic buy-side demands, including better measurement, more transparency and some form of standardization.

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.

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 […]

Commerce and retail media suddenly became an incredible tailwind for online advertising. But anyone banking on retail media networks to power programmatic growth for years to come needs a reality check, writes AdExchanger Senior Editor James Hercher.