This Digiday survey for Best Buy.Ads offers a more cautious view of retail media prospects. Just 17% of respondents expected the importance of retail media networks to grow significantly in 2023, and the fraction of brands expecting to spend more than 60% of their budget fell from 14% to zero. Half (51%) said retail media were no more effective than other channels.
U.S. Internet ad revenue grew 10.8% last year, less than the pandemic-driven 35.4% of 2021 but far outpacing TV (up 2.0%) and print (down 6%.0), says this PwC/IAB report. Search fell from 42.2% of Internet ad revenue in 2020 to 40.2% in 2022 and social fell from 31.5% to 30.3%. Video more than took up the slack, growing from 18.7% to 22.5%. The report predicts retail media will grow quickly due to its privacy-safe first-party data and closed loop response measurement.
You’ll recall that earlier this week Google Analytics took away first-click attribution models, which not-coincidentally give less credit than other methods to search ads like Google’s. Now we have this joint Microsoft-Roku effort that finds that coordinated TV streaming and web ads drive 11% more searches and 10% more clicks. The methodology is complicated but the results are more realistic.
Snowflake is always looking for ways to add value to its core cloud database product. Its latest step is to purchase Neeva, which offers generative AI-based search technology. It will be applied to help companies search their own databases, a.k.a. enterprise search.