ClickZ

Every retailer heading into Christmas has access to the same review data, the same on-site search logs, and roughly the same handful of CRM and AI tools. The gap between brands is no longer who has more data. It is who reads what they already have, and who resists the pull toward doing everything the same automated way. That was the throughline running underneath “Preparing for Peak Shopping Seasons: How to Win Christmas” at eCommerce Expo London.

Performance marketing teams run the same ritual heading into peak: find the ad that’s proven itself, then pour the budget behind it. A winning ad still does what a media team wants, since it validates the creative and earns the right to scale hard through peak’s biggest weeks. But leaning on that single winning ad to carry all of peak is no longer enough. What’s changed is who decides which audience sees that ad next.

A budget review runs the same way in a lot of retail marketing teams. The channel report comes back, and it favors whichever channel sits closest to the sale. Paid search and retargeting post strong returns again this quarter. The channels further back, the ones that first put the brand in front of someone, show thinner numbers by comparison. Finance wants the growth story to hold, and the fastest way to defend it looks like doubling down on whatever the report already credits.

Reddit released its first small business holiday insights report today, aimed at helping SMB advertisers understand how gift research and purchase intent build on the platform ahead of Q4. The report draws on Reddit’s internal conversation data alongside a February 2026 Attest survey of 1,000 US adults and GWI’s global Reddit user dataset.

The industry has spent 2026 rebuilding itself around outcomes. The IAB is standardising how they are measured. WPP has dissolved its holding company structure to chase them. Omnicom has bought IPG and named data its strategic engine. None of it has yet reached the people who actually spend the money, and they are failing in two opposite directions at once.

When AI sits between a brand and its shopper, does the sale get won by media placement or by what the brand says? At Retail Media Pioneers 2026, WPP Media put that argument to a formal vote. The session ran as an Oxford-style debate, complete with a motion, and an audience poll taken before and after. Naomi Boonin, VP Commerce UK at WPP Media, chaired the debate. Deni Petrova, VP Commerce at WPP Media, argued for the motion; Marco Bezerra, Executive Creative Director at WPP, argued against it.

Retail media’s newest disruption arrives wearing the shape of an AI agent. It can research a purchase, compare options and, before long, complete the transaction itself. At Retail Media Pioneers 2026, a panel took on that question directly. Its brief: forecast three years forward, to 2028, and be specific about what the industry gets wrong today. Ben Penrose, founder of STRIQE, moderated the session.

Retail media used to mean one thing: a sponsored slot at checkout. That is no longer true. A shopper now gets inspired to cook something new on Pinterest on a Friday night. She orders the ingredients from Wolt twenty minutes later. Budgets have followed that shift, spreading across more platforms and more networks than ever. That shift sat at the heart of a panel on day two of Retail Media Pioneers 2026.

Sixty-three percent of people who show up on Bol’s marketplace aren’t there to buy. They’re still browsing. Many haven’t even picked a brand yet. Justin Sandee, Director of Commercial Development at Bol.com, opened his session with that number. He argued browsing behavior is data, not noise. A product page viewed only once, which happens 26% of the time, is still worth reading as a signal. Sandee built his case around a campaign for JBL, the headphone brand.

A fragrance brand with no department store counter and no celebrity face is not a brand in trouble. For a Gen Z shopper, that gap can be the whole appeal. The category built its reputation on aspiration: a famous face, a glossy backdrop, a scent you saw advertised before you ever smelled it. That model works only if the shopper wants a sales pitch. And Gen Z usually does not. Sourabh Sharma runs two very different consumer brands.