Retail media has quickly moved from quirky curiosity to major channel. If you’ve been avoiding the topic, this dunnhumby report offers a good way to catch up. The report says retail media could be worth $50 billion this year, putting it in the same ballpark as direct mail ($43 billion) and linear TV ($63 billion)
Every self-respecting SaaS application wants an app marketplace of its own. Payment platform Stripe just reached that milestone, launching a marketplace with integrations including Hubspot, Mailchimp, Intercom, Dropbox, and Docusign. Users can access data from those tools within their Stripe dashboard and update the tools’ own files with data from Stripe.
Shoppable video is the mirror image of retail media: instead of selling someone else’s ads on a retail website, it lets companies convert their own website into a retailer. Maybe that makes no sense, but the symmetry is appealing. What’s even more appealing is $150 million, which is how much livestream platform Firework just raised in a Series B, brining total funding to $369 million.
I can’t bring myself to lead with yet another generative AI story, so we’ll start instead with this Forrester report for Airtable, which found that organizations have lots of software applications. The average is 367 in use at large organizations, with teams using an average of 45 daily and individuals using an average of 52 weekly. No surprise here but a good reminder of why data integration is so important.