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DoorDash acquires Instacart for $17B to gain its retail media network; analysts question whether Singles Day spend drives real growth or just discounts.
DoorDash just paid $17 billion for the retail media business it couldn't build — and with Singles Day live, a sharp new analysis asks whether brands are buying real growth or renting it. Two stories every ecommerce professional needs today.
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.
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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: Today's show has some real substance to it — three stories worth pulling apart.
Klara: DoorDash just spent seventeen billion dollars to buy a retail media network overnight. Then we're asking whether Singles Day actually grows brands — or just trains shoppers to wait for discounts.
Marco: And we sit down with the founder of Gutsy, a DTC dog food brand taking on the European pet market.
Klara: Let's dig in.
Marco: DoorDash just spent seventeen billion dollars to buy Instacart — and the real prize wasn't the grocery vans.
Klara: Let's rewind a bit. Retail media is the business of selling advertising space inside a shopping platform — think sponsored products, banner ads, promoted listings. Amazon built the gold standard of it. Every major retailer and delivery platform has been racing to catch up.
Marco: DoorDash was struggling in that race. It had the delivery network, the customers, the transaction data — but its ad business never matured into something that brands would seriously shift budget toward. Instacart had already done that work. Years of building, years of convincing brands to spend there, a proper ad stack that agencies actually know how to buy.
Klara: So rather than spend another five years trying to build that themselves, they bought it. Seventeen billion dollars is a lot of money, but what they're really buying is time.
Marco: And market position. Before this deal, brands in grocery and household goods — your FMCGs, your fast-moving consumer goods companies — had two serious options for US on-demand grocery advertising. Now they have one. That's a massive shift in who holds the leverage.
Klara: Though I'd be cautious about assuming this automatically hurts brands. Consolidation isn't always bad. A single, more powerful platform could actually make it easier to run bigger, cleaner campaigns without splitting budgets across two separate systems.
Marco: Maybe. But less competition almost always means higher prices eventually. If you're a brand spending in grocery retail media, your negotiating position just got weaker overnight.
Klara: And European brands watching this should pay attention too. This signals where retail media is heading globally — toward fewer, bigger players with more control over the buying process.
Marco: Our next story is up after a short break.
Marco: A sharp new analysis is asking a question that most brands spending big on Singles Day would rather not answer honestly.
Klara: Some quick context. Singles Day — the 11th of November — is the biggest ecommerce shopping event on the planet. Bigger than Black Friday, bigger than Cyber Monday. Brands pour enormous ad budgets into Amazon, TikTok Shop, and marketplace promotions to ride the wave.
Marco: The question the analysis raises is uncomfortable. How much of that revenue is actually new? New customers, new demand that wouldn't have existed otherwise. And how much is just existing customers buying early at a discount — money you would have made anyway, just at a worse margin.
Klara: That distinction — between genuinely new sales and sales you've simply moved around — is what performance marketers call incrementality. New revenue you wouldn't have had without the spend.
Marco: And the analysis points out something that should worry every brand planning their Black Friday budget right now. Ad tech platforms — the companies selling you the ad space — get paid regardless of whether your campaign created real growth. Their incentive is to show you a big number. Your incentive should be to know if that number actually means anything.
Klara: I'd partly defend the platforms here, though. Some brands genuinely do acquire new customers during 11.11. The event creates real awareness, especially for younger shoppers discovering brands on TikTok Shop for the first time.
Marco: Sure — but the question is whether your brand is one of them, or whether you're just discounting your way through November to hit a revenue target that evaporates in December.
Klara: Which is a question every ecommerce team should be sitting with right now, while the data is live.
Marco: Our third and final story is up next.
Marco: Our final story today is about a dog food brand — and it tells us something interesting about where European ecommerce is heading.
Klara: Pet food might not sound like the most exciting corner of commerce, but it's one of the fastest-growing direct-to-consumer categories in Europe right now. For years, the market was dominated by big legacy brands sold through supermarkets. Then a wave of digitally native challengers arrived — selling online, talking directly to pet owners, and competing hard on ingredient quality and transparency.
Marco: Gutsy is one of those challengers. It started as a student project — which is a great founding story — and it's now setting its sights on thirty-three million meals served across the European dog food market. That's the number they're targeting, and it signals real ambition for a brand that hasn't been around for decades.
Klara: What makes Gutsy interesting isn't just the scale target. It's the positioning. Transparent recipes, locally produced ingredients — that's a very deliberate choice. European consumers, especially post all the scrutiny around fast fashion and opaque supply chains, are increasingly suspicious of brands that can't tell them exactly what's in the box.
Marco: And pet food is a brilliant category for a subscription model. Dogs eat every day. Owners don't switch brands lightly once they find something their pet tolerates well. That means high lifetime value — the total amount a customer spends with you over time — and very strong repeat purchase rates.
Klara: I'd just add a note of realism here. Scaling a perishable, logistics-heavy product across Europe is genuinely hard. Local production is a great story, but it's also an expensive one. The unit economics — the cost of making and delivering each order — have to work at scale, not just on paper.
Marco: Fair — but if any category can support that kind of investment, premium pet food is it. The loyalty is real, and the willingness to pay is growing.
Marco: The single biggest idea from today — whether it's a $17 billion acquisition, a sales event that may not deliver what it promises, or a dog food brand taking on the giants, the brands winning right now are the ones being honest about what their growth actually costs.
Klara: So pick one number you celebrate — your Singles Day revenue, your customer count, your market share — and ask whether it looks as good when you strip out the discounts.