I just landed back in Atlanta after a big week in Las Vegas for Shoptalk — sleep deprived, over-caffeinated, and very happy to be home. The week was capped off by an epic hike in Zion National Park with my industry friend Ana Laura Zain, CMO at Metarouter.
It was a week of big conversations — on stage, on the show floor, and in the corridors. And when I look at everything I wrote this week, there’s a thread running through all of it: trust. Who’s earning it. Who’s squandering it. And what it actually costs to build a retail media business on a foundation of transparency.
‘Retail Media Has a PR Problem’ Says CVS Media Exchange’s Parbs Dhariwal The CVS Media Exchange chief is unusually candid about retail media’s credibility crisis — calling out the industry for “strong-arming” brand budgets and “grading its own homework.” His solution: deterministic data, IAB standards, and stop pretending modeled audiences are the same as real shopper behavior. Read here
The ‘Costco Velocity’ Tech Stack Is Coming Together. Here’s How the Pieces Fit. I hosted a livestream with Costco’s Mark Williamson and MetaRouter’s Jon Flugstad to dig into what’s actually being built — and why Costco’s bet on radical transparency (including putting their full tech stack on slides in front of competitors) is turning out to be both a sales tool and an internal forcing function. New partnerships with Moloco and Symbiosys are filling the gaps in real time. Read here
Are AI Ads the Next Big Ad Surface? How Retail Media Can Thrive OpenAI just hired Meta’s head of global ad solutions — which tells you everything about where this is going. In the final installment of my series with Amelia Van Camp of Mirakl, we unpack what agentic advertising actually looks like in practice, and why the same product data strategy that gets you recommended organically is the same one that positions you to advertise effectively inside an LLM. Read here
The Corridor Track at Shoptalk The panels talked about agentic commerce (with genuine disagreement about what it even means). The corridors were more candid: Meta is pushing into store-level data, retailers are going offsite but more deliberately than before, and the biggest unlock right now might just be better content. I rounded up the honest takes from five people I cornered off the show floor. Read here
83% of retail media campaigns can be gamed on iROAS. Here’s how. In my post this week for The Drum, I share new research that quantifies what many in retail media suspected – that methodological choices alone can swing incremental iROAS by 6.5x. This research was a collaboration from Albertsons Media Collective, Ovative Group, and and professors from Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. Read here
That’s it for this week!
PS: If you or your colleagues will be in Atlanta next Wednesday (April 1st), I’m hosting another commerce media industry happy hour. RSVP here to join us!
