RETHINK RETAIL

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500

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Sep 2026

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Rethink Retail - the evolution of retail in today’s connected world. Join us as we explore the most recent trends and innovations in commerce.

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60 recent

October 5, 202633 min

Retail Media and AI Agents Move at the Speed of Trust

Retail media moves at the speed of its people. Shopper habits, trust between retailers and brands, and comfort with handing work to AI all set the pace more than any piece of technology. Travis Clinger (LiveRamp) joins Drew Cashmore (Vantage and Chair, MiR) on this episode of Media Mondays to unpack what that means for building a lasting retail media network. INSIDE THE EPISODE: SHOPPERS MOVED FASTER THAN REGULATIONS Many in the industry expected regulators or Google to end the cookie by 2020 or 2021. Instead, shoppers moved to streaming TV and AI platforms so quickly that the cookie stopped mattering on its own. Reaching those shoppers now means matching the emails and phone numbers they share with each platform they use. TRUST IS THE SLOWEST STEP Retailers know what shoppers actually buy, online and in stores, and that proof is valuable enough that even airlines are now selling ads. Getting that data into a brand's hands takes far longer. A single data-sharing agreement can take six months, and suppliers repeat the process with every retailer they work with. Standard contracts and access rules would let the whole ecosystem move faster. AI AGENTS NEED PERMISSION FIRST Anyone can build an AI agent. Getting IT, security, and legal to approve one that touches company data takes much longer, and for good reason. LiveRamp is building every new feature for agents, but most work on its platform is still done by people, and tightly limited, trackable agents are likely to fill that role until companies are ready to hand over more. Listen above to hear why the retailers that make their data easiest to trust and use are the ones built to last.

October 2, 202645 min

Amazon vs. Meta: Who Controls the AI Shopper?

Amazon believes in AI shopping agents. It just wants to decide whose agents get through the door. Welcome to another edition of Retail Roundup. This is your weekly brief helping retail leaders decode the biggest shifts in retail, AI, and commerce. In this special edition, recorded live at Shoptalk Fall, Jeremy Goldman sits down with Christine Russo (What Just Happened Commerce Podcast), Charisma Glassman (Genpact), and Ricardo Belmar (Retail Razor) to discuss who controls the customer as AI agents, media networks, and early holiday deals reshape retail. INSIDE THE EPISODE: WALLED GARDENS OR AN OPEN DOOR: Amazon believes in AI shopping agents. It just wants to decide whose agents get through the door. By blocking Meta's agent while building its own, Amazon raises a bigger question about whether agentic commerce turns into a new version of the old platform wars, or whether shoppers eventually force the major players to work together. EVERYONE WITH A SCREEN WANTS A MEDIA NETWORK McDonald's is testing ads on its app, kiosks, and menu boards in 450 US restaurants. Best Buy will sell ads on its TVs after they're in customers' homes. More than 200 retail media networks now exist, but fewer than 50 earn enough to show up in financial reports. HOLIDAY SHOPPERS ARE STOCKING UP ON BASICS Adobe expects a record $275.1 billion in US online holiday spending, but some of the biggest Cyber Week jumps are forecast for clothing basics, personal hygiene, and baby products. With Walmart, Amazon, and Target all running major deals in the same October week, retailers face a harder question: are these events creating new demand or just pulling it forward? Plus: Brian Spencer (Kroger Precision Marketing) sits down with Goldman to explain why brands selling through Kroger can know their shoppers better than D2C brands do. A weekly grocery basket shows habits across every category, and that data now powers ads inside Kroger's AI shopping assistant. Listen above to hear the panel's take on who holds the power in retail heading into the holidays.

October 1, 202616 min

How to Own the Grocery Customer and Keep Them

In online grocery, the delivery driver is often the only person a customer ever meets from the retailer. Whoever runs that delivery, and whoever holds the order data behind it, holds the relationship and decides whether the customer comes back. That creates a tension in grocery right now. Retailers rely on delivery platforms to reach more customers, but those platforms want the customer data just as badly, and they often work with the retailer's competitors too. Petr Lizner (Veloq & Rohlik Group) and Diana Leza Sheehan (PDG Insights) joined Jeremy Goldman at Groceryshop to discuss what grocers gain by owning fulfillment and delivery, how to keep customers coming back while running it profitably, and what Rohlik has learned from more than a decade of building its model in-house. INSIDE THE EPISODE: LEVERAGE FOLLOWS THE FIRST-PARTY DATA: The partner with the most leverage is the one that sees what shoppers search for, add to their baskets, and leave behind. Many US grocers don't have that access. For Rohlik, customer data stays in-house because it feeds everything from remarketing to product design. As AI shopping agents arrive, that same data lets a retailer tailor recommendations around a child's allergy or a household's food intolerances. GROCERY LEAVES LESS ROOM FOR ERROR People buy groceries far more often than other products online, orders span multiple temperature zones, and margins are thin. Rohlik built its own technology end to end and set a target of 95% perfect orders: no delay, no substitution, no missing item, and no claim, including deliveries in 15-minute windows. The stakes are higher for a pure-play grocer, because a customer with one bad order goes to a physical store and doesn't come back online. IF YOU CAN OWN ONE PIECE, OWN THE FEEDBACK LOOP Not every grocer can afford to run fulfillment and delivery in-house. The piece worth keeping is the comparison between what the customer ordered and what they received, since it shows where the experience breaks and drives retention. Partners can fill in the rest. Listen above to hear how Rohlik made owning the full journey pay off, and why handing off the online business may soon look as risky as handing someone else the keys to your stores.

September 30, 202628 min

Missed Fiscal Regulations Can Close Your Stores Abroad

A retailer can get everything right in a new country and still be shut down over how it records a sale. The culprit is fiscalization, the rules for how every transaction gets reported to tax authorities. More than 100 countries have these rules, and no two are the same. Most were written for the cash register and have been patched country by country as retail went digital. A system that works in five markets can fail in the sixth. On this episode of Global Lens, Senior Retail Analyst Lavina Suthenthiran sits down with Marko Bogdanović, Marketing Lead at Fiscal Solutions, to explain why compliance breaks international rollouts and what retailers need in place before they cross a border. INSIDE THE EPISODE: A PROVEN POS STILL STARTS FROM ZERO IN A NEW COUNTRY Opening a sixth market isn't a copy-and-paste job. Each country requires its own devices, its own way of signing transactions, and its own tax authority to report to. The rules follow where the sale happens, so it doesn't matter where the brand is based. And because the laws rarely explain the technical details, even cities within the same country can read them differently. FINES ARE THE SMALLER RISK One bad transaction is a fixable problem. A pattern of them can close stores, shut down a country's operations, and hurt the brand everywhere else. Bogdanović's fix is simple. Put one person in charge of compliance so the knowledge lives in one place instead of being scattered across country teams. FISCALIZATION BELONGS IN ITS OWN LAYER Governments want more visibility, more real-time reporting, and tighter links between receipts and invoices. Rebuilding compliance for every checkout channel in every country gets expensive fast. Bogdanović makes the case for middleware, software that sits between the register and the tax authority, so retailers can enter new markets without rebuilding their systems each time. The laws don't explain how to implement them, so the fastest answers come from people who've already done it. That's the idea behind Community Day, a free, one-day event in Belgrade, Serbia, on October 15, for about 100 retailers, POS providers, and consultants. Sessions cover the Czech Republic's fiscal law returning in 2027, the challenges of Germany and France, e-invoicing with Avalara, and global POS rollouts with Metro Cash & Carry and Diebold Nixdorf. Listen above for Bogdanović's case that the receipt deserves as much planning as the storefront.

September 28, 202635 min

Retail Media's $100B Question: Can You Prove It?

Every number in retail media right now comes from someone grading their own homework. Retailers measure their own campaigns, and platforms measure their own inventory. Lindsay Pullins (Circana) says the fix is independent, standardized measurement that every retailer and platform gets held to, not just their own. On this episode of our Media in Retail podcast, host Jeremy Goldman sits down with Pullins to unpack what she's learned from sitting on the retailer side at Kroger Precision Marketing, the platform side at Roku, and now the independent measurement side at Circana. RETAIL MEDIA HAS A MEASUREMENT GAP, NOT A PERFORMANCE GAP Every commerce network uses its own methodology, attribution window, and definition of a "new buyer." The result, per the ANA, is that 55% of advertisers cite lack of standardization as their number one barrier to further investment. That leaves brands comparing 'apples to oranges to Brussels sprouts,' and doing their best anyway. A CLEAN ROOM IS A TOOL, NOT A STRATEGY The value isn't the room. It's whether an organization has already aligned on a single KPI before the data ever gets matched. Without that alignment, a clean room only produces expensively confirmed confusion. CTV AND RETAIL MEDIA ARE COLLIDING, AND THE DATA BACKS IT UP Recent research from Amazon and Roku shows that CTV exposure improves the performance of sponsored product ads running at the same time. This is hard evidence for something media buyers have long assumed: reinforcement across channels compounds. NON-ENDEMIC ADVERTISING STILL HASN'T ARRIVED Retailers hold rich data on their customers well beyond shopping behavior: life stage, intent, how demand shifts in real time. The problem is proving it worked. A retailer can't close the loop on a non-endemic ad the way it can on its own products, so non-endemic advertisers are left buying an audience without the measurement to justify the spend. Listen above for Pullins' full breakdown of where retail media measurement actually stands today, and her advice for building a career in an industry that didn't exist as a major when most of its current leaders were in school. Join in on this and similar conversations in person! Rethink Retail is bringing Commerce Media Saturday to NRF 2027: Retail's Big Show. Register here and select "Commerce Media Saturday" as an add-on.

September 25, 202630 min

Costco Hands Off Delivery as Kroger Bets on AI

Welcome to another edition of Retail Roundup. This is your weekly brief helping retail leaders decode the biggest shifts in retail, AI, and commerce. In this special in-person edition, recorded live at Groceryshop, Jeremy Goldman sits down with Michelle Evans (Euromonitor International), Andrea Leigh (Allume Group), and Virginia Marsh (Fluent) to unpack the biggest grocery stories breaking both on and off the show floor this week. Instacart's B2B Pivot Signals Delivery Is Becoming a Commodity Instacart just added Gopuff for 15-minute delivery, expanded its Dollar General deal, and rolled out real-time shelf-mapping software. With order growth slowing and delivery turning into a commodity, Instacart is building its moat elsewhere: enterprise data and an AI assistant, Clementine, widely regarded as the best in the category. Kroger's AI Assistant Is Already Producing Bigger Baskets Kroger EVP and CIO Yael Cosset announced on the Groceryshop stage that the company's new AI shopping assistant is driving bigger baskets. However, higher spend may reflect already-engaged super-users, not the AI itself. Even so, a well-timed recommendation can genuinely remind someone what they forgot, adding real value, even if the causation isn't proven yet. Costco Opens Its Doors to DoorDash and Uber Eats Uber Eats has expanded Costco delivery from 17 states to 47, and DoorDash now delivers from every US Costco warehouse. Handing off fulfillment to third parties sits awkwardly with a membership model built around owning the customer relationship, and risks quietly devaluing the membership itself. Diesel Prices Are Becoming Grocery's Next Inflation Threat US diesel prices have surged past $6.50 a gallon, up 77% year over year, with inventories at their lowest level since 1982. Retailers who can consolidate deliveries and build density into their truck routes may weather this better than most. Fuel surcharges might be a more palatable way to pass costs to shoppers than a straight price hike. Listen above for the full conversation, plus this week's WTF stories: an AI-referral ranking gap so large one pantry brand outperforms its actual sales rank by 23x, and the Converse ad that reminded everyone why you should show your creative to more than one set of eyes before it airs.

September 23, 202618 min

TIARA Sells by Teaching Buyers, Not Pitching

Zuly Matallana's brand has the kind of unpaid advocacy most founders spend years chasing: a Dragon's Den investor who still posts about the product, a Good Morning America feature, a celebrity's on-camera endorsement. None of it replaced the sales work. Matallana, Founder of TIARA, still sends samples to buyers herself. She still works trade show floors. She still cold-emails retailers with no guarantee anyone opens the message. TIARA was founded after Matallana lost her grandmother and aunt to breast cancer, a disease that affects roughly one in eight women in their lifetime. She decided the deodorant industry had never been forced to answer for its ingredient lists, and built a brand around that gap. On this episode of Global Lens, she joins Senior Retail Analyst Lavina Suthenthiran to discuss what moves product once advocacy is already in place. INSIDE THE EPISODE: Recognition opens the door; it doesn't walk through it for you Most founders treat advocacy as the finish line. Matallana treats it as a foot in the door. No matter the promotion, none of it replaces the trade show booth where she explains, ingredient by ingredient, why her formula is different. Credibility gets built one educated buyer at a time Matallana's sales pitch isn't the product. It's the ingredient list. She shows buyers exactly what's wrong with the deodorants already on their shelves, then makes the case for what should replace them. The founder is the advocate no one can outsource Not every brand puts its founder in the room, but TIARA does. Matallana stands in front of strangers to explain why an ingredient matters herself. It's slower than hiring it out, and it's why she's staying the face of the brand as it scales. Listen above for Matallana's take on why most personal care products were never formulated for women's bodies, and her early steps toward selling beyond North America.

September 21, 202630 min

Retail Media's Investment Gap and How to Close It

A new Rethink Retail series going inside the real strategies, real numbers, and real people building retail media from the ground up. In our debut episode, host Drew Cashmore, Chair of the Media in Retail Community, sits down with Austin Leonard, Vice President and General Manager of DG Media Network, to break down what it actually takes to build a retail media network and where this industry still has room to grow. INSIDE THE EPISODE: Retail media hasn't caught up to the rest of the investment story Core retail IT and martech have seen serious capital flow into them for years. Retail media hasn't seen the same investment yet, despite the precedent for it elsewhere. Proving this industry's importance, and its room to grow, is a job the whole space needs to take on together. This job isn't like other media jobs, and that's the point Coming from traditional media into retail media means rolling up your sleeves and learning an entirely different business, fast. The advice for anyone stepping into the space: be patient and impatient at the exact same time. 21,000+ stores aren't just footprint; they're the product Physical scale is the differentiator, not a byproduct. Leaning into what makes a retailer's stores unique shapes entirely different media products, and finding that "secret sauce" matters more than copying what works somewhere else. 🎧 Listen above to hear how Austin is building Dollar General’s Media Network playbook, one investment, one hire, and one differentiator at a time

September 18, 202635 min

AI's Existential Risk Debate Hits Retail's Radar

Welcome to another edition of Retail Roundup. This is your weekly brief helping retail leaders decode the biggest shifts in retail, AI, and commerce. In this week's episode, Jeremy Goldman sits down with Petr Lízner (Rohlik Group), Aidan Mittra (OrderGrid), and David Polinchock (Unified Brand Experience Lab) to unpack AI's growing safety debate, what it means to own the customer relationship as agents start shopping on our behalf, and where retail media is outpacing the core business. INSIDE THE EPISODE: The AI apocalypse debate isn't just a Silicon Valley conversation anymore An Anthropic researcher resigned this week, warning that frontier AI could pose existential risk within the decade. Separately, AI agents in a sandboxed test allegedly lied and self-terminated to cover their tracks. Both raise a real question for retail: how much should AI safety factor into decisions being made right now? AI shopping assistants have moved from experiment to expectation Instacart's Clementine and Shopify's Ask Shopify are turning prompts into ready-to-buy carts, and the data backs it up: AI-referred shoppers convert nearly 50% better, with 14% higher order values, per Shopify. Petr Lízner shares how Rohlik's own voice-enabled assistant, Maya, closed a customer's entire grocery order while he was driving, no typing required. Retail media is booming while grocery's core business isn't Kroger cut its full-year sales outlook to as low as 0.2% growth, even as Kroger Precision Marketing profit jumped 24%, its strongest growth since 2021. More grocers may be tempted to chase that same retail media playbook, even if it costs something in the in-store experience. Target's new "brand and guest experience" hire signals a bigger shift Target tapped former Hilton CMO Mark Weinstein to oversee brand, guest experience, Roundel, and Target Plus all at once. The real story may be treating loyalty and retail media as one connected discipline instead of two separate teams. Listen above for the full conversation on the trends making us rethink retail this week. Then check out "What's In Store," Renee Hartmann and Sharon Yourell Lawlor's new series, for a closer look inside Rohlik Group's own operations.

September 16, 202614 min

When Tariffs Hit, Calgary Co-op Doubled Down on Local

$27.6 billion in American goods now enters Canada facing a new tariff, 15%, 25%, or 50% depending on the product, as part of Canada's counter-tariffs on US goods. Dairy, general merchandise, and health and beauty are all caught in it, while Alberta's "Buy Alberta" campaign is pushing grocers to make Canadian products impossible to miss on the shelf For most retailers, that's a scramble. For Calgary Co-op, it's a confirmation. In this episode of the Global Lens podcast, Lavina Suthenthiran sits down with Walter Roth, Director, Digital Commerce & Retail Systems at Calgary Co-op, to find out what a sudden trade shock actually looks like on the ground, and why a 70-year-old, member-owned grocer says the tariffs haven't forced a single strategic pivot. INSIDE THE EPISODE: - Local sourcing isn't a response to tariffs; it's a head start Calgary Co-op was running "Best From the West" long before this trade war started: Alberta beef, Alberta chicken, Western Canadian goods, built into the business for years. So when tariffs hit, there was no scramble to relabel shelves. There was already a campaign running. - "Made in Canada" is a less reliable label than it looks "Made in Canada" turned out to be more complicated than a flag on a package. Some suppliers manufacture the same product in both countries so that identical packaging can carry a different origin week to week. Roth explains why Calgary Co-op built its strategy around regional sourcing instead of a label that couldn't always be trusted. - There's a fourth option beyond absorb, pass on, or swap Most retailers facing new tariffs pick from three familiar levers. Roth argues there's a fourth: wrap the product in enough customer education and experience that the tariffs become almost beside the point. Listen above to hear why Roth believes the real lesson, for any retailer, anywhere, is turning supply chain disruption into a customer story instead of a customer complaint.