The Commerce Collective Podcast

As Amazon's Ads Agent takes on more campaign planning and activation, where can agencies make the biggest difference? Live at Amazon unBoxed, Emma Irwin talks with Sarah Iooss of Amazon Ads about how agencies can bring strategic perspective, creative thinking, and cultural insight to AI-assisted advertising. They also discuss Amazon Marketing Cloud as the connective tissue between actions and outcomes, and why brands should approach Black Friday and Cyber Monday as full-funnel opportunities.

In this month’s episode, Emma and Danny Hoffman, VP, Commerce Strategy, unpack three stories shaping the next phase of commerce. Shein’s falling stock price raises questions about whether its ultra-low-cost business model is sustainable and whether American consumers are moving beyond ultra-cheap fast fashion. The holiday season is already taking shape, from Target’s Q2 momentum and Amazon’s October Prime Big Deal Days to Best Buy’s plans to create more engaging in-store experiences. Is there any risk in retailers pushing the holiday shopping season earlier and earlier? And TikTok may be exploring peer-to-peer payments through direct messages, raising a bigger question: is the platform building a new commerce layer, or aiming even bigger into financial services?

Winning the shelf used to mean securing placement in store. Then it meant winning the endless digital shelf. Today, the shelf is much broader: it can be a store aisle, a search result, a product page, a sponsored placement, a streaming ad, or an AI-generated recommendation. In this episode, Emma talks with Flywheel experts Michael Rogosa and Ythan Pratt about what it takes for brands to win across the physical, digital, and emerging AI shelf. They discuss why in-store and online strategies need to be connected, how physical shelf strategy is being reshaped by retail media, why digital shelf fundamentals still matter, and what changes when AI starts narrowing product discovery into a much smaller set of recommendations.

In the second episode of our Big Shift series, Emma sits down with Phil Camarota, Chief Creative Officer at Flywheel, to explore how fragmentation shows up in a brand’s creative experience.Phil explains why fragmentation is more than disconnected teams or KPIs. It can also break the brand story consumers experience across creators, retail media, ecommerce, stores, and the shelf. He breaks down why consistency does not mean repeating the same message everywhere, how physical and digital retail should play complementary roles, and why the store still matters as a place for reassurance, immersion, and relationship building.The conversation also covers creative commerce, AI’s impact on real-time commerce, what Total Commerce means in practice, and why brands should take a closer look at how their integrated agency teams are actually collaborating.This episode builds on ideas from The Big Shift: From managing to mastering fragmentation. Read the full whitepaper for the complete story.

In this month’s episode, Emma and Danny Hoffman, Senior Director of Global Retail Strategy, unpack three developments reshaping the consumer relationship.Kroger’s planned acquisition of Giant Eagle and Uber’s offer for Delivery Hero show how retailers and platforms are expanding across stores, loyalty, pharmacy, delivery, data and local commerce. TikTok Shop’s growing use of AI-assisted affiliate content raises questions about scale, creator control and consumer trust.They also explore Carrefour Belgium’s balanced nutrition strategy and what a retailer-led health push means for broader Europe. Emma and Danny discuss what it reveals about the relationship between retailers, government and brands, what it would take for a similar model to take hold in the U.S., and how brands can build affordable wellness and broader value into their portfolios as consumer expectations evolve.