Wunderman Thompson reports that 45% of global consumers are interested in shopping after they are dead. Puts a whole new spin on “richest person in the graveyard.” Less surprising but still interesting: 32% of online spending in on mobile devices and 19% of everything ordered online is returned. There’s lots of regional detail here if you want it.
The wild success of retail media networks has spawned a need for tools to manage them effectively. IPG Mediabrands’ media agency network UM has introduced jauntily-named Shoptimizer, a budgeting and optimization tool for the purpose. The key feature is a dashboard comparing performance of different retail networks and offering AI-powered budget allocation recommendations.
The clueless boss is a favorite meme in many circles, though probably not among bosses. This IBM survey offers some support, finding that 69% of CEOs believe generative AI will offer broad benefits to their organization but just 29% of their supporting executives feel their company has the expertise to make it work. Two-thirds of CEOs are acting without a clear view of how to help their workforce adjust the AI-created disruptions.
Microsoft has confirmed that Reddit has blocked its Bing search engine from crawling content; Reddit seems to have blocked DuckDuckGo too. Reddit content will still appear in Google search results, but then Google has paid Reddit $60 million to allow it to train its AI models on that content. Reddit says the block has nothing to do with the Google deal: okay.