Rethink Retail

Retail media now draws $170 billion a year, more than TV and CTV combined, and much of that money buys ads few shoppers remember. Lisa Zielinski (Ipsos) joins Jeremy Goldman on this episode of Media Mondays to unpack Creativity Over Clicks, Ipsos’s study of more than 21,000 simulated shopping trips on Amazon and Walmart, and what it means for brands and retail media networks. INSIDE THE EPISODE: Retail sites are a tough place to be remembered Ads on retailer sites were 47% less likely to be remembered than standard web placements. Shoppers are on a mission, surrounded by competitors’ product shots, and most ads look like one more pack shot with a “Buy Now” button. Every network needs its own creative Only 29% of display ads and 64% of video ads performed similarly across Amazon, Walmart, and the open web. With brands now advertising on about eight retail networks, and some on as many as 30, reusing the same banners everywhere wastes real money. Social platforms have spent years teaching advertisers what works on their sites, and retail networks have room to do the same. ROAS misses the shoppers who matter most Short-term ROAS mostly measures shoppers who already knew what they’d buy. Creative quality barely moves them. Strong creative matters for undecided shoppers and people not yet shopping the category, delivering a 21% advantage with the latter. Because ROAS can’t see that effect, in several cases it would have pointed brands toward their weaker ad. Listen above to hear what it takes for retail media to build brands as well as sell products.

Welcome to another edition of Retail Roundup, your weekly brief helping retail leaders decode the biggest shifts in retail, AI, and commerce. This week, Jeremy Goldman is joined by Andrea K. Leigh (Allume Group) and, for the first time behind the Rethink mic, our own Chris Parsons to discuss how brands and retailers are fighting to keep their customers as loyalty fades and AI changes how people shop. INSIDE THE EPISODE: Nike’s turnaround gets harder Greater China sales fell 26%, and Nike extended its turnaround timeline with more layoffs and a restructuring aimed at $2.5 billion in savings through fiscal 2031. The bigger issue may be cultural relevance, as shoppers who grew up in Jordans now reach for New Balance, Salomon, and Hoka. Pulling back from retailers to focus on direct sales also made Nike harder to find for the many shoppers who still buy shoes in stores. Private label tests brand pricing power P&G’s new CEO takes over as shoppers question whether brands like Tide and Pampers are worth the premium. Target now runs 11 owned brands, each topping $1 billion a year, and Allume Group found that 49% of shoppers have tried a new private-label product. P&G says it isn’t seeing a meaningful shift. Even so, rising costs that vary sharply by region and store shelves that offer little guidance beyond price are making brand loyalty harder to maintain. TikTok puts an AI agent between discovery and checkout TikTok’s new Shopping Assistant answers questions about sizing and shipping, and Buy Direct lets shoppers purchase without leaving the feed. Platforms now compete for share of time as much as share of wallet. Twenty years ago, Amazon worked to cut time on site with 1-Click checkout. Now everyone wants shoppers to linger, leaving retailers to decide how much of the customer relationship they’ll give up for the sale. Also in the episode: ads arrive in ChatGPT, a lawsuit over Starbucks’ “sugar-free” drinks, brands betting on microdramas, and why self-checkout may be retail’s version of a missed rom-com moment (yes, we’re linking Say Anything). Plus: Ask an AI agent to buy you a TV, and it could come back with a hundred. Bradford Peirce (Auth0) explains why that risk grows as agents move from recommending products to buying them, and why retailers need to know what each agent is allowed to spend. For a closer look at how retailers can verify agents before they buy, download Auth0’s Agentic Commerce eBook. Listen above to hear whether retailers should meet shoppers on other platforms or bring those platforms onto their own sites.

Leverage, local knowledge, and high margins. That's the recipe Andrew Nichols (Warroad Original Hockey Co.) has learned to grow a consumer brand across new channels and countries. His perspective comes from more than 20 years in consumer brands, starting at Unilever, spending nearly a decade at Crocs in Canada, and growing BioSteel to a sale in 2019. He joins Lavina Suthenthiran on this week's Global Lens to share what separates brands that scale at retail from those that stall. INSIDE THE EPISODE: Find the retailer that shares your goal Specialty chains like GNC demanded steep margins from new brands, so BioSteel started in sporting goods stores, where shoppers already spent on peak performance. Grocers growing their wellness aisles followed by the time BioSteel approached GNC, its sales elsewhere gave it leverage to negotiate fairer terms. Every market buys differently Canadian shoppers tend to spend more cautiously. The US offers room to grow fast. Europe brings strict rules and multiple languages on every hang tag. Brands that invest in people and infrastructure before understanding a market's pricing and readiness risk pulling out entirely. Margin decides how far a brand can go Selling direct online means paying a long line of partners before the brand sees a dollar. Advertising on Meta alone can eat up to 25% of revenue, and Shopify, warehouses, and shipping carriers all take their cut too. Without mid-to-high 70s margins at full price, a brand can't cover those costs as it grows. Listen above to hear how Crocs outlasted predictions of its collapse in 2008, and why a brand built on a real customer need can outlive any trend.

Until 2024, SharkNinja ran its direct-to-consumer business on two separate tech stacks, one for North America and one for Europe. Every new market added more complexity just as the company wanted to grow faster. So it rebuilt its storefront, order management, and payments on one global foundation, all while getting ready for a new kind of shopper: the AI agent that buys on a customer's behalf. Greg Sheive and Michael Cicchetti (SharkNinja), along with Priyanka Agrawal (Adyen), joined Lavina Suthenthiran to discuss what it takes to rebuild a global stack without slowing down, and what changes when checkout moves off your own website. INSIDE THE EPISODE: One stack beats many Running payments market by market carries costs that never show up on an invoice. Entering a new country can mean building new technology to accept a local payment method. Scattered payment data leads to more declined transactions and finance teams that are juggling five or more vendor contracts and separate reports. One platform turns all of that into a single view of the business. Change one thing at a time A global replatform has fewer ways to fail when every piece doesn't move at once. SharkNinja switched to Adyen for payments while still on its old platform, then moved each country to Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Checkout was already stable before the bigger migration began, and the phased rollout ran with zero downtime. Checkout is moving off your website Selling through AI agents brings three new problems. Product, inventory, and delivery data have to update instantly, or an agent promises something that's out of stock. Fraud systems built to block bots may block a real customer's agent. And if an agent invents free overnight shipping, it's unclear who pays. SharkNinja expects some of these early bets to miss and treats them as a way to learn fast. Listen above to hear how SharkNinja is building one tech foundation that can handle every new channel, including the ones run by AI.

Retail media moves at the speed of its people. Shopper habits, trust between retailers and brands, and comfort with handing work to AI all set the pace more than any piece of technology. Travis Clinger (LiveRamp) joins Drew Cashmore (Vantage and Chair, MiR) on this episode of Media Mondays to unpack what that means for building a lasting retail media network. INSIDE THE EPISODE: SHOPPERS MOVED FASTER THAN REGULATIONS Many in the industry expected regulators or Google to end the cookie by 2020 or 2021. Instead, shoppers moved to streaming TV and AI platforms so quickly that the cookie stopped mattering on its own. Reaching those shoppers now means matching the emails and phone numbers they share with each platform they use. TRUST IS THE SLOWEST STEP Retailers know what shoppers actually buy, online and in stores, and that proof is valuable enough that even airlines are now selling ads. Getting that data into a brand's hands takes far longer. A single data-sharing agreement can take six months, and suppliers repeat the process with every retailer they work with. Standard contracts and access rules would let the whole ecosystem move faster. AI AGENTS NEED PERMISSION FIRST Anyone can build an AI agent. Getting IT, security, and legal to approve one that touches company data takes much longer, and for good reason. LiveRamp is building every new feature for agents, but most work on its platform is still done by people, and tightly limited, trackable agents are likely to fill that role until companies are ready to hand over more. Listen above to hear why the retailers that make their data easiest to trust and use are the ones built to last.