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.
Disney has agreed to license more than 200 characters, costumes, and environments (but not voices or talent likenesses) to OpenAI for Sora, its gen AI video platform. This is highly unusual for Disney, which generally sues AI models for copyright infringement; in fact, it sued Google for that a day before announcing the OpenAI deal. Disney will also invest $1 billion in OpenAI, nicely illustrating how very eager they are to join the AI party.