Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
AppLovin posts blowout growth as a Meta alternative; BarkBox revenue falls despite DTC recovery; Omnicom joins SMG's cross-retailer media exchange pilot in Europe.
AppLovin is challenging Meta for DTC ad budgets and the numbers are hard to ignore. Plus, BarkBox reveals a warning sign hiding inside a recovery story — and Omnicom just made retail media standardisation in Europe real.
In this episode:
The Digital Commerce Daily is a concise briefing for ecommerce, retail media and digital commerce professionals, hosted by Marco & Klara. New episode every day.
Enjoying the show? A quick rating or review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify helps other marketers find us.
Also from Marco & Klara: The FMCG Marketing Daily · The Health Marketing Daily
Your 8-minute briefing on the platforms, players, and profits driving digital commerce today. Hosted by Marco and Klara.
Marco: Three stories worth your time this morning — mobile ads, subscription economics, and the future of retail media buying.
Klara: AppLovin is quietly becoming a name every performance marketer needs to know. Then we're looking at what BarkBox's numbers reveal about the subscription DTC model right now. And finally, a signal that cross-retailer ad buying in Europe is getting much more serious.
Marco: Let's go.
Marco: AppLovin just posted another blowout quarter — and most ecommerce marketers are still sleeping on it.
Klara: So let's rewind for a second. For years, if you wanted to run performance ads — that means ads measured on actual sales or sign-ups, not just views — you basically had two options: Meta or Google. Everything else was a distant afterthought.
Marco: AppLovin changed that. It built a mobile advertising platform that plugs into thousands of apps and games, and it's been quietly pulling in serious ad budgets from direct-to-consumer brands who are tired of rising costs on Meta.
Klara: And the numbers back that up. AppLovin came in just under a major revenue milestone this quarter — still posting exceptional growth rates while Meta and Google are dealing with regulatory headaches, advertiser pressure, and their own algorithm headaches. Wall Street noticed the earnings. What's interesting is that investors are still holding back. The stock isn't surging the way you'd expect from results like these.
Marco: That hesitation is worth taking seriously. The market is basically asking — is AppLovin winning because it's genuinely better, or is it winning because its rivals are having a rough patch? Those are very different stories.
Klara: And for European brands especially, this matters. If you're a DTC brand running acquisition campaigns — that means campaigns designed to bring in brand new customers — and you're almost entirely on Meta, you're exposed. AppLovin is a real diversification option now.
Marco: Though I'd say the investor caution is a signal to test it, not bet everything on it. Build it into your mix. See what the data tells you. Don't treat it as a Meta replacement just yet.
Klara: Measured optimism. That works for me.
Marco: Up next — our second story of the day.
Marco: BarkBox just posted a quarter that should make every subscription brand sit up and pay attention — because the numbers tell two very different stories at once.
Klara: So Bark is the company behind BarkBox, the monthly dog toy and treat subscription. It's been one of the poster children for DTC subscription commerce — the idea that you get customers to pay regularly, automatically, every month, rather than chasing one-off purchases.
Marco: And the headline from their fiscal second quarter — that's the three months ending September 30 — is that direct-to-consumer commerce actually started growing again. Orders recovering. That sounds positive.
Klara: Except total net revenue still fell. Which is the uncomfortable part. You can have more orders coming in and still be making less money overall. That gap is the story.
Marco: And there are a few explanations. Churn — that's customers cancelling their subscriptions — might be eating into the base faster than new orders replace them. Or the product mix has shifted, meaning people are buying cheaper items. Or margins are getting squeezed somewhere in the chain.
Klara: What I find revealing is the retail side. Bark sells through retail channels as well, not just direct. So when overall revenue falls despite DTC recovering, it suggests the pressure is broader than one channel having a bad quarter.
Marco: For any brand running a subscription model going into peak season — and there are a lot of them in Europe, everything from beauty boxes to coffee — this is a warning. Recovering order volumes feel like progress. But if your average order value is dropping and your churn is high, volume alone won't save you.
Klara: Though I'd push back slightly on the doom reading. Commerce resuming growth after a dip is still a foundation to build on. The question is whether the subscription economics get fixed on top of it.
Marco: That's the right question to be asking heading into Q4.
Klara: Our third story is next.
Marco: Omnicom Media — one of the world's biggest advertising agency groups — has just signed on as the launch partner for a new retail media exchange in Europe, and it's a bigger deal than it sounds.
Klara: So here's the problem it's trying to solve. Retail media — that's advertising space sold by retailers, like sponsored products on a supermarket's website — has exploded in Europe. But every retailer runs their own separate platform. Tesco's system, Zalando's system, Carrefour's system — they all work differently, measure differently, and report differently. For a brand trying to run campaigns across multiple retailers at once, it's an operational nightmare.
Marco: SMG has built something called RMX — a retail media exchange. The idea is straightforward: one interface, multiple retailers, campaigns bought and measured in a single place. And they've just named Omnicom Media as the beta partner, meaning one of the largest holders of advertising budget in the world is now going to actually run real money through it.
Klara: That last part matters a lot. The industry has been talking about retail media standardisation for years. The difference here is that Omnicom isn't just endorsing the idea — they're committing budget to test it. That's what turns a concept into infrastructure.
Marco: And if the pilot delivers, this becomes the template. Other agencies follow. Retailers have to plug in or risk being left out of consolidated buying plans. The whole landscape shifts.
Klara: Though I'd say the measurement question isn't solved yet. Building a shared buying layer is one thing. Getting retailers to agree on common metrics — what counts as a sale, what counts as an impression — is a much harder negotiation, and that work is still ahead.
Marco: Which is exactly why a pilot like this is the right place to start. You find out where the friction is before you try to scale it.
Marco: The single biggest idea from today — growth on paper means nothing if the economics underneath don't hold.
Klara: So look at wherever you're spending or scaling right now — mobile ads, subscriptions, retail media — and ask whether the numbers you're watching are the ones that actually matter.