CDP Institute

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.