Costco eCommerce Jumps, Beats Earnings
Warehouse club giant Costco beat estimates this fiscal quarter, driven partly by a thriving eCommerce business. Both online traffic and sales improved year-over-year, following the broader upward trend within online grocery. The 13% year-over-year increase in eCommerce sales, according to CEO Ron Vachris, is a result of increased market share by shipping large, bulky items.
While Costco is not known for loud, flashy advancements to its eCommerce infrastructure or retail media strategies, it consistently delivers impressive results. You can find the full earnings report here.
Is 2025 the Year of Retail Media Standardization?
Earlier this month, IAB and IAB Europe released In-Store retail media standards, building on their existing Retail Media Measurement guidelines. These documents provide crucial structure in a rapidly growing industry; as additional retail media networks launch, and existing retail media networks expand, it becomes exponentially more difficult for brands, agencies, and advertisers to maintain clean data.
In a recent piece from Adexchanger.com, this “Christmas miracle” is explored in detail, including some headwinds of the ubiquitous adoption of industry standards. Large ad networks may not need standardization as much as smaller niche networks, so this might act as a disincentive to adopt these standards. Positive signs exist, such as LiveRamp “strongly adopting” these standards.
Our Take: It remains to be seen how each ad network will adapt to this industry shift. What seems like a “no-brainer” to most practitioners is likely more like a prisoner’s dilemma of sorts. In other words, since standards are only effective once they’re fully adopted, it requires a critical mass of buy-in before they become, well, standard. It’s likely that relevant parties would want to be the only ones sticking their neck out since that’s time and resources they won’t be getting back.
Consumers Prep for Last-Minute Shopping
157.2 million. That’s the estimated number of American consumers who plan to shop on “Super Saturday,” the Saturday before Christmas. That is… a lot, likely the second busiest Super Saturday of all time (2022 was massive) and would be 15 million more than last year.
All this to say, if you aren’t fully dialed into the traffic that tomorrow will bring, you better be soon! The National Retail Federation estimates that ~70 million of these folks will be shopping both in-store and online, and ~38 million will shop primarily online. It’s too late to send products to fulfillment centers, but it’s not too late to shore up your advertising strategies, such as using Share of Voice data to inform your PPC Dayparting.
Uber Hires Retail Media Maven to Lead Ads Business
Uber wants a bigger piece of the retail media pie, it seems! Earlier this week, RetailDive shared the news that Uber has hired Kristi Argyilan, a key architect of RMNs at Albertsons and Target, as global head of Advertising.
The role’s key focuses include scaling existing ad products and expanding the pool of retailers, as well as specifically bringing on more non-endemic advertisers.
Our Take: Uber’s dual offering, being a taxi service for both people and food, offers a uniquely flexible opportunity for advertisers. Implicit in their service is access to behavioral data, giving Uber unique insight into how consumers live their lives. This hire signals that Uber is looking to leverage its unique dataset for a stronger return for advertisers, and if their history as an industry disruptor is any indication, it will likely carry them into a a strong competitor in the space.
Amazon Employees Go on Historic Strike
On Thursday, 12/19, Teamsters launched the “Largest strike against Amazon in American History,” with nearly 10,000 workers participating. The strike was designed to disrupt last-minute holiday purchases in an effort to negotiate better wages and working conditions.
This strike was not unexpected, with news outlets reporting it several weeks in advance.
