Digital marketing strategy for retailers: SEO, AIO, paid ads, email, and influencer marketing.
Signals point to retail media and marketplace fees, not product markup, driving gross margin expansion at large US retailers over the 2026 holiday quarter. The prediction is testable in results published between late February and mid-March 2027.
Google made local inventory ads the default for every Google Shopping campaign on August 31, 2026, ending the opt-in that let retailers keep online and in-store budgets apart. Campaigns with a local feed now serve both channels unless an inventory filter is applied per campaign.
Second-quarter results from three separate ad tech companies point the same way: the bundled managed-service layer of retail media likely keeps contracting through Q1 2027. Expect at least two more top-100 US or European retailers to disclose a move off managed service before the end of that quarter.
Signals point to agentic commerce settling on a retailer-controlled, reroute-to-store model by holiday 2026, with retailers as merchant of record rather than universal in-chat agent checkout. A prediction falsifiable at Cyber Week and in Q4 earnings.
DoorDash’s new global ad platform, The Trade Desk poaching Uber’s ad chief, and a $4bn-plus run rate point one way: delivery apps are about to sell their order data into the open web. Expect offsite commerce media to surface as a named growth driver on Q3 2026 earnings calls, before year-end.
Three signals from the past month, an executive hire, a $1bn-plus acquisition and a new measurement standard, point to retail media and the independent DSP layer merging in H2 2026. Expect The Trade Desk to brand a commerce-media offering and at least one more retail media network to buy or bind a DSP before year-end.
A new industry benchmark landed this week that grades retailers on a single, increasingly urgent question: can an AI shopping agent actually find, read, and …
US retail media ad spend is on pace to hit $71.09 billion in 2026, up roughly 18% from last year, and almost all of the …
The June 2026 rush into connected TV, led by Walmart’s Vibe.co deal and Amazon’s shoppable Samsung ads, points to a clear next step: a second major US retail media network is likely to announce a CTV consolidation move before year-end 2026.
Three signals from the last month point to in-store retail media measurement, not off-site, as the decisive battleground. Expect another top-tier US retailer to move before Q4 2026 earnings wrap.