My top 6 highlights from the new 'Retailgentic' podcast
The agentic AI wave is coming at blistering speed. Waiting on the sidelines is no safer than it was when retail marketplaces first appeared.
Latest
How These 4 Retail Media Leaders Are Using AI Right Now
These examples prove that real problems can be solved with the right tools.
Should We Really Care What Consumers Think About Retail Media Ads?
Here's the reality: asking shoppers about retail media ads is like asking fish about water—they're swimming in it without realizing it exists.
How an RMN's tech stack impacts your advertising results
Advertisers have both a duty and a right to understand how RMNs are built—and how that structure impacts their performance.
Why AI Search Advertising Could Reach $25 Billion By 2029
EMARKETER now projects U.S. advertisers will pour over $25 billion—about 14% of all search budgets—into AI-powered search results by 2029.
How These 4 Retail Media Leaders Make Conference Season Count
The reality is that this year, conference expenses will likely be under more scrutiny than ever before across our industry. Successful conference attendance requires the same strategic thinking we apply to retail media campaigns.
Mary Meeker Is So Back: My Notes From Her 340-Page AI Futurecast
I spent 2 hours reading Mary Meeker’s 340-page AI trends report so you don’t have to... But you probably still should. Here are my 6 highlights for retailers, brands and agencies.
Meta Says ‘Just Trust Us’ With AI Ads, Will Amazon Follow Suit?
The real question is whether Amazon will preserve the transparency and control that increasingly define its competitive advantage against the black box futures its rivals envision.
Where Does The Ecomm Team Really Belong? 3 Brand-Side Leaders Share Their Org Charts
The placement of e-commerce teams seems to depend heavily on a company's history, existing strengths, and the gaps they need to fill. Still, it's always interesting to hear how other brands are set up.
Is Retail Media Actually Kinda 'Mid'? PART 2
On a recent Jason + Scot Show podcast episode, Jason Goldberg argued that all the excitement around retail media fizzles once you step off Amazon’s turf: Sponsored Products Ads dominate, small 3P sellers fund most of them, and regional or specialty networks lack true incremental dollars. I totally took the
Walmart's Sparky AI Assistant: A Late Mover with Early Promise
I remain convinced that shoppers will increasingly turn to their own personal AI assistants for help interacting with retailers, rather than relying on retailer AI assistants who always going to be limited by context from their own walled garden.
AI in real life: how retailers and brands are leveraging AI (real numbers)
Most businesses struggle not with what AI can do, but with envisioning what it should do for their specific challenges. Today I'm sharing four real examples where companies figured out the "what" and can tell you exactly what they got back.
Blog
Career Sliding Doors: The Pivotal Moments That Changed These 4 Ecomm Leaders' Careers
In an industry where tomorrow's challenges are unknown and the landscape shifts monthly, perhaps the most valuable skill is simply being comfortable with the unexpected doors that open along the way.
Blog
Retailers Hit 99% Ad Coverage Without Killing User Experience, New Research Shows
New research from retail media tech provider Pentaleap finds that retailers like Amazon, Walmart and Home Depot already serve sponsored products on virtually every search result—97-99 % of queries—while maintaining shopper engagement (CTR and CVR) on par with organic listings.
AI
55% of consumers say they don't trust AI shopping chatbots & recommendations
While 75% of consumers have encountered AI recommendations or chatbots online, only 44% actually engaged with them.
Blog
Walmart is Betting on AI Agents, While Amazon Goes Proprietary
The brands and retailers that get this right won't be the ones with the flashiest AI features. They'll be the ones that make it seamless for both humans and bots to do business with them.
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How retailers 'Do' Sponsored Product ads: 4 takeaways for brands
The follow-up to a killer benchmark report last year from Pentaleap just dropped today, comparing how major retail media networks perform across search terms, categories, and bidding models. I'm doing a 2-parter breaking down my biggest takeaways from the report. In this post today, I'll share
Blog
Brands demand retail media standards. Retailers say it's too hard. Do they kind of have a point?
Before we begin, if you like today's post, you'll love the webinar I'm part of next week: The Retail Media Halo Effect brought to us by Keen Decision Systems and Future Commerce. Much of my thoughts below came from noodling on the very topics
Blog
Instacart’s Turnaround CEO Heads To The AI Frontier
This article was originally published to my Forbes column on May 8th. You can read the original article here. Fidji Simo, Instacart’s CEO since August 2021, said yesterday she’ll move to OpenAI later this year to run its consumer products. Her departure comes after transforming Instacart from a
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Prime Day 2025: Are Brands Scaling Back? (And 3 Reasons To Reconsider)
Last week I ran a poll on LinkedIn asking how brands plan to participate in Prime Day 2025 compared to previous years. The results paint an interesting picture: * Going Bigger: 12.50% * About the same: 35.7% * Scaling back: 37.5% * Skipping it: 14.29% That means over half (51.
RMBC
Is Retail Media Actually Kinda 'Mid'?
Today, I'm sharing "The Back-Channel" - a grab-bag of snippets from conversations with industry insiders that I've had in the past week or so. The point is to identify updates on the big themes that are happening in the industry, just as if we
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"We're Not Dabbling Here" Amazon Q1 Earnings Highlight AI Progress
"We're not dabbling here" said Amazon CEO Andy Jassy on the company's earnings call on Thursday. That's an understatement. Jassy pointed to a 'thousand plus AI applications' that are being baked at Amazon right now. As he put it: "
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DSPs Wanted: The Retail Media Revolution 96% of Advertisers Crave
Until 1914, any vessel moving between the Atlantic and Pacific had to brave the 13,000-kilometre journey around Cape Horn. The Panama Canal completely rewired world trade by letting ships cut straight through a tightly governed corridor—with Panama collecting the tolls. Today, retailers sit on a trove of first-party
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Amazon Q1 Earnings Scorecard: Winners, Losers, and the Calm Before the Tariff Storm
Amazon announced its Q1 2025 earnings last Thursday. Here's my hot take on a few winners and losers, from within the earnings call and in recent discussions with brands and solution providers. When the dust settled on Amazon's Q1 earnings, the headline numbers looked solid – Amazon