Commerce

Academy Sports and Outdoors, a sporting goods chain founded in 1938, is trying to get trendy.

This week, we’re diving into the most important thing in advertising – the actual creative – and how major ad platforms are well on their way to an era of creative innovation. Actually, strike that. I meant creative desolation.

Incrementality is a retail media term for attribution. It’s the attempt to measure the actual contribution of advertising to a business’ bottom line. But in a market where everything old is new and everything new has been done a thousand times, it’s important to focus on other kinds of incremental gains.

Albertsons is taking that first step into non-endemic advertising next week via a partnership with Rokt to serve ads to people who have already purchased groceries.

This week’s dispatch explores the new trend of false advertising class-action suits in the food and CPG industry and how the evolution of online, data-driven retail media could exacerbate the problem.

A growing number of retail media networks are partnering with ad tech intermediaries and each other to manufacture national scale. And you can add regional grocery chains Wegmans and Giant Eagle to that list.

Unfortunately, we seem stuck with our longtime measurement standards, like the trusty old CPM and ROAS. But for change to happen, it must come from within.

What if the new storefront is a person sitting on their couch and scrolling their phone?

Fixating on ROAS makes it harder to figure out how certain parts of a campaign perform, especially now that retail media buys often include other, less performance-focused channels like display and CTV as audience extension.

It’s lawn season – and you know what that means. Scott’s Miracle-Gro commercials, of course. Except this time, spots for Scott’s will be brought to you by The Home Depot’s retail media network.