ClickZ

Most of a brand’s revenue now happens somewhere the marketing team can’t see. A pixel tracks a website. It has no view of a shelf on Amazon, a cart inside TikTok Shop, or a browse session that started on one platform and closed on another. D2C sales have plateaued below 20% of US ecommerce, and the rest now moves through marketplaces and retail media networks that last click attribution was never built to read.

The brand-versus-performance debate has outlived its usefulness. Marketers keep sorting themselves into camps, brand or performance, as if the split reflects something true about how growth works. It doesn’t. The split says more about how growth gets measured, since most tools built to track performance simply weren’t designed to see what brand spend does. That was the argument Jamie Bolton, Chief Strategy Officer at Fospha, made opening the Brand track at eTail Boston 2026.

Retailers spent a decade optimizing for speed: fewer clicks, faster checkout, shorter funnels. That assumption is broken. New global research presented at eTail Boston 2026 shows AI is doing the opposite of what most marketers expected. It is not compressing the path to purchase. It is stretching it out, and in the process, rewriting who gets discovered and who gets ignored.

For the last two years, retailers have heard one message about AI: move fast. Warby Parker’s fireside chat at eTail Boston made a narrower case. Sometimes the fastest path is the one you build yourself. Sandy Gilsenan is Chief Retail & Customer Officer at Warby Parker. She discussed that build-first instinct with Jill Manoff, Editor in Chief of Glossy & Modern Retail. The topic was electronic health records, a subject with no obvious retail glamour.

The product detail page was supposed to be settled territory. It was the destination, the place where discovery ended and conversion began, and for most of eCommerce’s history it looked the same no matter who showed up. That assumption is now breaking apart.

TL;DR VistaPrint’s ambassador program deliberately targets creators with 3,000 to 10,000 followers, finding they drive more engagement than bigger names Unscripted content from a real No7 customer outperformed a paid, heavily briefed influencer campaign in the brand’s paid social funnel VistaPrint’s forthcoming Local Love program treats its 7,000 employees as a latent advocacy network capable of generating up to 21,000 new community touchpoints A former VistaPrint ambassador’s unsolicited...

TL;DR Evelyn & Bobbie named three brand pillars competitors can’t copy: consumer-generated content over influencers, six industrial patents on bra design, and a founder story Bradshaw Home runs specific, category-level messaging across thousands of SKUs instead of one broad pitch, using multiple exposures to tell the fuller story Watering a message down to appeal to everyone erodes both distinctiveness and credibility Standard measurement, including ROAS, consistently understates the value of...

Retail conferences have spent the past year treating AI as a settled revolution, with the customer assumed to be ready for it. David Cost pushes back on that. He is Chief Digital Officer at Rainbow Apparel Co, the affordable fast-fashion retailer with more than 850 stores serving everyday Americans. He runs AI experiments at scale and judges them on hard numbers.

There’s a specific kind of budget line that exists to be technically true rather than actually useful. A brand wants to look like it’s testing upper-funnel formats. So Demand Gen gets a token allocation, a few percent of the Google account. That’s enough to say the channel is “live.” But it’s not enough spend for the algorithm to learn anything, or for anyone to draw a real conclusion from the results.

Every paid search lead has sat with this account. Performance Max and Brand Search are running clean. ROAS is respectable. The team has pulled every lever available. New asset groups. Tighter audience signals. Adjusted bidding. Still, the number won’t move quarter over quarter. The natural conclusion is that the account has hit its ceiling. That conclusion is usually wrong. It’s an expensive place to stop looking. Google built PMax and Brand Search to capture demand.