This Month Above the Fold - Amazon Earnings, “Help Me Decide,” Walmart Buys a Mall, and the CPG Manufacturer of the Future

In this month’s episode, Emma and Danny Hoffman, Senior Director of Global Retail Strategy, unpack three developments reshaping the consumer relationship.

Kroger’s planned acquisition of Giant Eagle and Uber’s offer for Delivery Hero show how retailers and platforms are expanding across stores, loyalty, pharmacy, delivery, data and local commerce. TikTok Shop’s growing use of AI-assisted affiliate content raises questions about scale, creator control and consumer trust.

They also explore Carrefour Belgium’s balanced nutrition strategy and what a retailer-led health push means fro broader Europe. Emma and Danny discuss what it reveals about the relationship between retailers, government and brands, what it would take for a similar model to take hold in the U.S., and how brands can build affordable wellness and broader value into their portfolios as consumer expectations evolve.

Measurement isn’t failing marketers. It’s failing to reflect how people actually shop. As consumers move fluidly across streaming, social, digital, and stores, measurement still operates in silos, optimizing channels instead of understanding the full journey. The result is more data with less clarity on what drives growth.

Jon Gibs, Group Director, Media Insights and Measurement, Walmart Connect joins the show to explore how full-funnel measurement is evolving from attribution to creative effectiveness, and what it takes to turn fragmented signals into a clearer picture of business impact. With a unique vantage point across the ecosystem, Walmart Connect helps marketers tie first-party shopping behavior with exposure across in-store, ecommerce, and VIZIO’s CTV ecosystem, and move beyond isolated metrics to understand how awareness, consideration, and conversion work together.

In this month’s episode, Emma and Danny Hoffman, Senior Director of Global Retail Strategy, break down three commerce shifts brands should be watching: how Amazon’s rebrand of Rufus to Alexa for Shopping is embedding conversational commerce directly into the shopping journey, why Prime Day moving to June changes the retail calendar, and how store remodels are turning physical retail into a more connected data and consumer experience.

Today’s shoppers bounce between retailers, channels, and missions, but they still expect brands to understand what they need. In this episode, Emma sits down with Tiffany Tan, Head of eComm Growth Accelerator at Clorox, to talk about how Clorox is striving toward 1:1, personalized marketing, the data and clean room foundations behind it, and how AI can help scale personalization in a real, practical way.

You’ll hear how Clorox thinks about high‑value shoppers, what it takes to move from broad targeting to more tailored experiences, and how Tiffany is planning for a future where creative, audiences, and measurement all work together to serve real people, not segments on a slide.

In this month’s episode, Emma and Danny Hoffman, Senior Director of Global Retail Strategy, break down three commerce topics brands should have on their radar right now: who is absorbing the cost of ever-faster fulfillment, what California’s case against Amazon could mean for brands and consumers, and why Amazon’s move to more brand-agnostic Sponsored Prompts signals a bigger shift in how shoppers search and how brands show up in AI-assisted discovery.

Partnership marketing has shifted from a nice-to-have to a real growth lever for brands looking to cut through the noise. In this episode, Keke Strayhan, Head of Partnerships at Flywheel, breaks down what makes a partnership actually work, why authenticity and strategy matter more than hype, and how brands of all sizes can use partnerships to reach new audiences, build cultural relevance, and drive sales.

In this month's episode, Emma and Danny Hoffman (Senior Director, Global Retail Strategy) break down three commerce topics brands should have on their radar right now: what Joybuy’s launch in Europe could mean for competition, why more advertising dollars may keep moving toward retailer DSPs instead of other media environments, and how AI is starting to change the way shoppers discover products and how brands show up.

In this episode, Emma and Patrick break down three pressure points every brand should be watching. First, they tackle the performance vs. transparency tradeoff in media buying. What's the balance between log‑level data and control, chasing opaque performance, and using transparency to actually change how and where you buy?

Then they unpack The Trade Desk’s latest earnings and what its slowdown (and supply‑side growth elsewhere) signal about where spend is shifting across DSPs, CTV, and the open internet.

Finally, they dig into the rush of vendors promising “LLM performance” measurement, covering how pricing is already collapsing, how little real differentiation there is, and how brands should approach contracts, trust, and experimentation in this new category.