Retail media growth is coming at the cost of paid search budgets.  Standard Media Index reports that search ad growth rates have fallen faster than non-search ads for the past year, and that search spending by companies that sell through retailers has dropped more quickly than spending by others.  They conclude that companies selling through retailers are shifting their spend from search to retail media networks.

Let’s look outside the conventional advertising box today, Dear Reader.  We’ll start with this survey from BWG Strategy and Talon America, which finds that out-of-home ads are taking a larger share of total marketing spend.  Funds are most likely to be shifted from social media (31%) and linear TV (25%) budgets.

Nearly one-third of major news publishers have blocked generative AI tools from reading their content.   But that’s a drastic measure which could also exclude their results from conventional search engines.  Microsoft has just given publishers the option to block access by Bing Chat without also removing their content from search results.  We’ll see if competitors do the same.