CDP Institute

Retail media promises mouth-wateringly precise audience segments based on retailers’ transaction data, but retailers’ own ad inventory is often limited. Pairzon, a retail-oriented CDP, has unveiled a Retail Media Solution that avoids this problem by sharing its segments with Meta, Google, TikTok, and other major ad platforms. It’s all privacy-safe, of course, and includes closed-loop attribution, tying ad impressions to physical or digital transactions.

Retail media is still growing but the industry spotlight is now moving on. “Contextual commerce” (or shoppable ads, if you prefer plain English) is a new rising star, now expanding beyond social media, display, and mobile to include Connected TV. In fact, 62% of respondents to a Digiday/Warner Bros. Discovery survey of 90 agencies, brands, retailers and marketers say they’re already leveraging shoppable ads on CTV, with 77% allocating more than 20% of their 2025 budget to CTV, up from 13% in 2024.

And what comes after shoppable ads? Glance AI, an InMobi subsidiary backed by Google, does away with ad placements entirely, replacing them with custom fashion recommendations on your phone or CTV home page. Glance’s AI examines consumer-uploaded selfies, scans 400+ online catalogs for fashions that fit the consumer’s personal style, and shows how the clothes would look on the consumer.

New media require new metrics. Value intelligence startup Pay-i has landed $4.9 million in seed funding to fill that gap for genAI. The solution provides a real-time dashboard that lets users assign dollar and time values to measurable genAI outcomes, comparing the performances of models, agents or prompts.

“Contextual commerce” is here to stay: within just the past month, 7.5 million U.S. households have purchased a physical product through a CTV ad, according to research and consultancy service Parks. That’s eight percent of households that watch streaming video. It’s still way short of the 24% that subscribed to one or other video service — the biggest type of transaction in streaming.

A new study published in Jama Internal Medicine compared responses to almost 200 patient questions by physicians and chatbots in a social media forum. In almost 80% of cases, evaluators preferred the longer and more empathetic responses by the bots (maybe doctors are just busier than bots?). The next step would be to use AI agents for this; after all, Cisco forecasts that AI assistants will be handling 68% of customer service in the tech sector by 2028.

As Oprah never quite said, Everybody gets an agent! If you’re keeping score, the latest announcements we have include: Aprimo adding AI agent to its digital asset management and content operations platform; customer success platform Gainsight adding a new agent suite called Atlas, and Similarweb offering agents to help with search marketing and sales outreach.

Bored with agents? Looking for the Next Big Thing? This Winterberry Group reports says it’s “contextual commerce”, which “enables transactions directly within content, apps and platforms that users already engage with.” This (very long) David Raab blog post argues for something similar.

The New York Times, a jealous guardian of its editorial content from poaching by LLMs (it sued OpenAI and Microsoft) has concluded a deal licensing content for use by Amazon. In the first deal of its kind for the Times, Amazon will be permitted to use Times content in its AI platforms. This “will bring Times editorial content to a variety of Amazon customer experiences,” the news organization has said, although it’s not clear whether users will know when that’s happening.

Call tracking and conversation analytics platform Invoca has acquired Symbl.ai, an LLM trained on human conversations. Using Symbl technology, Invoca plans to capture the real-time flow of conversational interactions, surfacing emotional and contextual insights for the immediate use of human agents. Symbl will also be able to perform tasks like booking an appointment in the absence of human agents and when contact centers are closed.

Channel Factory, the ad performance optimization platform focused on YouTube and social video, is launching Channel Factory Intelligence, using machine learning to deliver campaign insights and optimize for efficiency, precision, and ROI. AI-powered Media Intelligence Hub will centralize cross-platform campaign data in a customizable dashboard. A new Chatbot Assistant, embedded in Channel Factory’s activation solution, ActivateIQ, will deliver campaign data analytics to ad agencies and their technology partners.

New Gen offers to replace your personalized website with a chat-based interface that will generate custom assemblies of products, images and content on the fly. Their trick is connecting your product catalog to their AI engine, which also lays the groundwork for connecting buyers’ AI-agents to the catalog directly. They launched with $4.5 million in seed funding.