Retail Media

This Wednesday marks the beginning of Hershey’s first major brand marketing campaign since 2018

Retailers court luxury goods to compete with Amazon; indie agency Tombras acquires Opinionated; and talk of an AI bubble dominates discussion at Davos.

Retail’s Big Show, the annual NRF event in New York City, was big on agentic commerce, unsurprisingly, as well as influencer and creator marketing, which was an eye-opener.

The year ahead in commerce, with insights from the NRF Big Show conference, where retailers congregate every January. Plus, the 2026 privacy policy cheat sheet.

On Wednesday, retail and CPG data company SPINS added a new piece with its acquisition of MikMak, a click-to-buy ad tech and analytics startup that helps optimize their commerce media.

Believe it or not, car oil change service company Valvoline is in the midst of a fascinating retail marketing transformation.

Inside Coca-Cola’s pivot from TV advertising to influencer marketing; Netflix inks another exclusive video podcast deal with iHeartMedia; and Madison & Wall predicts slow US ad spend growth in 2026.

The grocery chain Albertson’s is trying to reduce the time and number of clicks it takes to add an item to an online shopping cart. It’s new click-to-cart product should help.

People tend to think of digital-native product brands as a single bucket. But there’s a huge difference between companies that are social natives, for instance, rather than an Amazon-based brand.

Shopify launched its latest advertising business line on Wednesday, called the Shopify Product Network.

Grocery TV’s Marlow Nickell joins AdExchanger’s Inside the Stack to explain why in-store retail media is “inevitable” and what brands miss when they overlook the shelf.

America’s biggest department stores are changing, and changing fast.

AI agents have infiltrated retail media. At least, that’s how it felt to big Wall Street advertising and tech investors, who brought a sense of existential dread to Criteo’s quarterly earnings call on Wednesday.

PayPal Ads is continuing its new product announcement whirlwind with news that it’s partnering with the commerce media startup Rokt to bring non-endemic advertisers to some PayPal and Venmo post-payment pages.

Walmart’s AI shopping deal with ChatGPT might ding its retail media biz; the MRC shares updates on which platforms won and lost accreditation; and kids’ sports streaming is becoming a real media channel.

Retail media has broken through some critical threshold, and is no longer the straightforward digitalization of shopper marketing budgets.

Mastercard launched an ad network; Meta plans to sell targeted ads based on engagement with its AI products; and the Washington Post is in trouble if Ad Chief Johanna Mayer-Jones departs.

Marketing has long struggled to prove itself as a growth engine. What if agentic AI isn’t the threat many fear but the breakthrough marketing always needed?

The fundamental shift from traditional search to AI chatbots has major implications for the entire marketing organization, says Bluefish CEO Alex Sherman. If brands want control over how they appear in AI search results, they must think about the content they feed to large language models.

Last year, Shipt went hunting for a DSP, eyeing new programmatic reach and hyper-local targeting down to the ZIP code.

Retail media is entering what might be called its Socratic phase. The closer we to get to understanding an ad campaign’s real impact and business results, the clearer it is that we have no idea how this thing works.

Criteo announced a partnership with Google Search Ads 360 (SA360), Google’s enterprise search advertising platform, making Criteo the first third-party vendor to integrate with Google for on-site retail media supply.

GAM’s dinner with ad agencies sparked speculation that Google is preparing to spin off its bundled SSP and ad server as a remedy to its ad tech monopoly. But Google says it’s just part of the trend of SSPs going direct to buyers.

In June, Marriott launched a new media network designed to connect its customers to relevant brands throughout the travel journey.

Commerce media is booming, and everyone wants a piece of it. For commerce media networks, servicing the growing pool of media buyers brings many new opportunities and new challenges.

Product prices and marketing budgets are flip sides of the same coin. But the phase-in effects of tariffs, combined with vicissitudes of global weather and commodity production, challenge that truism.

The competitive set has shifted and it’s stacked against independent DSPs. But, instead of chasing what competitors already own, TTD can own what they can’t: trust.

Walmart Connect’s deal with The Trade Desk isn’t so exclusive anymore; Amazon is competing with everyone except publishers; and Meta’s chatbots don’t exactly inspire confidence in the company’s ability to deliver effective AI tools.

Volta Media, which is owned by the gas station and energy giant Shell, will be shuttered by November and its network of more than 2,000 charging stations will be dismantled this year.

For a moment, it seemed that beverage aisles and refrigerator sections in chains across the country were cracking open for startups and independent brands to compete with Coca-Cola, Pepsi and Dr Pepper.