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Verified market signals· Filtered by "Retail Media"
CommerceIQ has announced a new integration with Chewy Ads, bringing AI-powered retail media management to the platform. This is a new product capability and partnership announcement.
At Amazon's unBoxed event, the company unveiled a range of AI-driven advertising tools, including Amazon Ads Agent, Full-Funnel Campaigns, and conversational analytics. However, advertisers and agency professionals expressed more excitement about a simpler tool: Review Requests, which invites verified buyers to rate or review products with a single tap, leading to a threefold increase in reviews during testing. The event signaled Amazon's strategic focus on its core self-serve advertiser base of marketplace sellers rather than pushing upper-funnel offerings. The keynote dedicated little time to Prime Video or live sports, emphasizing onsite performance ads. Additionally, Amazon introduced Branded Conversations, a new ad unit inside its AI shopping assistant Alexa for Shopping, allowing brands to provide product expertise in shopping conversations. Industry observers noted a broader trend of retail media networks retrenching towards onsite ad formats, as evidenced by a Bain & Company and eMarketer survey.
DoorDash has added Macy's, Anthropologie, The North Face, Vans, and Timberland to its retail marketplace, expanding beyond restaurant delivery. The company also launched Dasher Returns, a service that coordinates pickups for product returns. On the technology side, DoorDash announced Text DoorDash, an expansion of its Ask DoorDash in-app assistant, allowing customers to place orders via text messaging. These moves follow a milestone partnership with Costco and the expansion of its SNAP/EBT program with seven new grocers. DoorDash aims to build a 'mall in your pocket' by reducing friction in online shopping, leveraging AI and agentic assistants to improve discovery and conversion. The company reports over 4.5 million users have added SNAP cards, and 75,000 stores accept the benefit. The focus is on serving routine shopping habits and providing value through savings and convenience.
McDonald's is building its own commerce media network, confirmed at its 2026 Investor Day. A pilot is running in 450 company-owned US restaurants since August. The network leverages the company's massive reach (70 million daily guests, 46,000 restaurants), growing loyalty program (~220 million active members), and digital touchpoints like the app, self-order kiosks, digital menu boards, and drive-thru systems. Advertisers can reach consumers close to the point of purchase, with potential for closed-loop measurement linking ads to actual orders. The company is also standardizing its global tech platform (GMA One) to facilitate international rollout. While high margins are expected, revenue sharing with franchisees and protecting customer experience remain key challenges. The long-term goal is a billion-dollar business.
OpenAI announced an expanded partnership with Albertsons Companies to integrate AI into the retailer's operations and customer experience. This includes deploying ChatGPT Enterprise internally, building custom AI-powered shopping experiences using the OpenAI API, and introducing a new Safeway plugin in ChatGPT that allows shoppers to plan meals, build carts, and check out within the chat interface. The partnership aims to improve operational efficiency, provide data-driven recommendations, and enhance customer convenience. Albertsons plans to expand the Safeway experience to other grocery brands like Albertsons, Vons, and Jewel-Osco. The initiative is supported by insights from dunnhumby's Consumer Trends Tracker, indicating growing shopper openness to AI for grocery purchases. The collaboration seeks to streamline retail workflows, enhance decision-making, and deliver personalized assistance at scale.
Teads, the omnichannel outcomes platform, and Koddi, a leading commerce media platform, today announced a global partnership delivering an open, universal OpenRTB standard for onsite retail media inventory.
Within a week in September 2026, two major retailers announced new multi-touch attribution (MTA) capabilities for their retail media networks. Albertsons Media Collective launched an incrementality-based MTA built with LiveRamp and piloted by PepsiCo, while Best Buy Ads released its own in-house MTA within My Ads. The author, Kiri Masters, questions the revival given MTA's fall from favor, but analyzes retailer incentives: MTA may serve as a tool to unlock brand budgets, which are larger than performance budgets, by justifying higher CPMs and measuring full-funnel impact. Retailers see demand from shopper marketing teams, but brands and consultants express skepticism about MTA's accuracy, data access, and black-box nature. The article contrasts retailer-owned systems with independent tools like Clerdata, Incremental, Keen Decision Systems, and Circana, and discusses limitations of the Albertsons-LiveRamp partnership, which is grocery-exclusive and excludes Google Search and Amazon.
Best Buy will launch on TikTok Shop in late October, offering nearly 10,000 products from brands like Microsoft, Dyson, Bose, and Oura. Customers can purchase directly within the app, with orders fulfilled by Best Buy and returns accepted in stores. The retailer's content creators and advertisers can use shoppable content and affiliate links to track engagement and sales. This move is part of Best Buy's transformation into a retail media and technology company, leveraging social commerce to reach consumers at the point of discovery and gather data. The launch follows similar moves by Ulta Beauty and Sephora, and comes as TikTok Shop's sales are projected to exceed $20 billion this year and $30 billion by 2028.
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