Topic
Advertising sold by retailers and commerce platforms like Amazon and Walmart, using first-party shopper data to target ads on and off site and measure sales.
Walmart, with a $6.4 billion ad business, now lets advertisers use its shopper data to target and measure ads on Warner Bros. Discovery's linear TV networks. It points proof of purchase at TV's brand budgets, starting slowly by Walmart's own account.
Reality
ISBA and MediaSense audited five major UK retail media networks and found five definitions of an attributed sale. For marketers choosing among more than 200 networks worldwide, the basic unit of return can change from one network to the next.
Reality
Amazon's Full-Funnel Campaigns let its AI decide how an advertiser's budget runs across sponsored ads, display, video and streaming TV in one campaign. Amazon now sells the ad space and picks each buyer's mix across it while government allegations over its auction practices still follow its ad business.
Reality
Amazon's DSP has been charging close to nothing on guaranteed buys where The Trade Desk historically took 15 to 20 per cent. It carries that spread into a ChatGPT pilot that names one advertiser and no volumes.
Perspective Coverage
3 publishersReality
Meta's Muse agent reached the top of Apple's free app chart by doing users' shopping for them, and Amazon shut it out of its store on contract grounds, a theory Amazon already lost a ruling on against Perplexity.
Reality
Amazon's robots.txt now disallows ChatGPT-User and OAI-SearchBot, and in ZDNET's tests the shopping agent sent a buyer to Walmart, eBay and a retailer called Soaplicity instead of Amazon listings.
Reality
New disallow rules for ChatGPT-User and OAI-SearchBot went into Amazon's robots.txt without an announcement. Amazon earns roughly $56 billion a year from advertising that bills only while shoppers are on its own pages.
Reality
Amazon stopped Meta's agent at its own website on September 20, citing conditions of use that speak about robots and data gathering tools. Its court case against Perplexity's shopping agent had already been set back on appeal.
Reality
A pilot launched Sept. 10 puts ChatGPT ad space inside Amazon DSP, so OpenAI gets a sales force it never hired and Amazon gets the advertiser contract for inventory it does not own or host.
Reality
Regulators say a synthetic bid quietly lifted the clearing price inside Amazon's ad auctions. The awkward part for buyers is that the only party who can confirm their own exposure is the party being sued.
Perspective Coverage
4 publishersReality