The only real question about the retail media network at BJ’s Wholesale Club is why it took so long to get started.  The answer may be they didn’t want to build it for themselves, since they just announced their program will use Microsoft PromoteIQ, a comprehensive retail media platform that Microsoft bought in 2019.  Props to Microsoft for making that deal before retail media networks were cool.

Martech keeps taking larger bites out of marketing budgets: 17.3% last year, 19.9% this year, 23.5% next year, and 30.9% five years from now, according to the latest CMO Survey. This despite barely more than half (56.4%) of current tools being used and nearly half (48.8%) of the survey respondents reporting worse-than-expected results. Oddly enough, marketers rate selecting marketing technologies as the thing they do best.