This Thursday I hosted the 3rd monthly Retail Media Industry Meetup in Atlanta.
Atlanta is an interesting place for retail media because while we have some major retail HQs here (Home Depot, Coke, Newell), the meetups are suprisingly light on folks from those companies. Instead, we get a rag-tag group of people from agencies, tech vendors, retailers, and brands that aren’t HQ’d here. The remote people going it alone, sometimes organizationally, but also physically. Those are the people who find a way to clock off before 5PM and battle the horiffic traffic in Buckhead in order to sidle up to some strangers at a hotel bar.
Welcome to being a retail media professional in 2026.
And, if you want to join us, our next meetup is April 1st :)
Now onto this week’s posts. This week’s pieces are all riffs on the same uncomfortable truth: in commerce media, the narrative changes fast, but the incentives change slowly.
Consumers are quietly moving the “research” part of the journey into LLMs. Platforms are making it cheaper than ever to ship new surfaces. And inside brands and retailers, measurement still defaults to the metric that protects budgets, headcount, and sanity.
Now, onto the stories and highlights from this week!
Retail media’s dirty laundry: What skeletons are hiding in the closet?
My latest column for The Drum explores a bombshell campaign against media rebates that has the ad industry talking. I consider five ethical dilemmas that the industry needs to confront. Read here
Brands want retail media standards. Retailers say it’s too hard. Do they kind of have a point?
I revisited a piece I wrote on the standardization debate, with fresh reactions and a more nuanced read on why this remains so messy. The punchline: brands want comparability, but they also keep asking for custom everything — and retailers aren’t exactly rushing to expose the data that would make their weakest placements look worse. Read here
Dark Search, Broken Signals, and What Comes Next for Retail Media
A deeper look at “dark search” — the growing share of discovery that happens inside ChatGPT / Gemini, leaving retailers with the sale but not the signals that made their ad businesses work. I lay out the practical responses: shift toward where inspiration starts, collaborate on data, treat the PDP like a mini homepage, and double down on in-store. Read here
When Everything Is Easy to Build, Getting Found Is What’s Hard
My highlights from Eric Seufert’s new series The Prosperous Society, and the best counter-thesis I’ve heard to the “AI kills the economy” story. If AI makes production cheap, distribution gets more expensive. Which means advertising (as demand routing) becomes more structural, not less — and agentic commerce doesn’t magically eliminate allocation. Read here
Why ROAS Refuses To Die
What’s the real reason ROAS persists even when everyone agrees it’s flawed? It’s not a knowledge problem. It’s a collective action problem: every actor is behaving rationally inside a broken system. Until incentives change, we should expect the same panels, the same nodding, and the same Monday-morning optimization. Read here
That’s it for this week!
PS: if you want to see my work first thing at 6AM ET Monday - Thursday instead of waiting for this recap at the end of the week, please reply to let me know and I’ll update your email preferences.
