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Amazon serves Sponsored Product ads inside SMS, TikTok adds match types and negative keywords, and Fox completes its $22B Roku acquisition.
Amazon just made your text inbox a shoppable ad surface. TikTok now rivals Google for paid search precision. And Fox's $22B Roku deal reshapes how ecommerce brands buy streaming TV.
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: Good morning — today's show is packed with stories that touch every corner of digital commerce.
Klara: Amazon's turning text messages into a shoppable ad channel. TikTok is becoming a genuine search platform. And Fox has just swallowed Roku whole for twenty-two billion dollars.
Marco: Three stories, all pointing at where ad budgets are heading next.
Klara: Let's get started.
Marco: Amazon just made text messages shoppable — and dropped ads right into the conversation.
Klara: To understand why that's significant, you need to know how Amazon's shopping assistant already works. It's an AI tool that helps customers find and buy products. Up until now, that mostly happened inside the Amazon app or website.
Marco: What's changed is the channel. Amazon's AI shopping assistant can now accept purchase orders directly through SMS — that's a standard text message, nothing you need to download. And inside those text conversations, Amazon is serving Sponsored Product ads. These are the paid listings brands already use to show up prominently in Amazon search results. Now they'll appear in your text thread too.
Klara: The rollout is heading to millions of users in the coming weeks. So this isn't a small test. Amazon is treating your phone's messaging app as a new shop front.
Marco: For brands advertising on Amazon, this is urgent. Every business running Sponsored Products could start appearing inside SMS conversations without changing a single thing about their current campaigns. That sounds convenient, but it raises real questions. Text messages are a tiny format. No big images, no long descriptions. The creative rules that work on a search results page don't automatically translate.
Klara: And I'd want to understand the bidding side. If your ads now run in an extra placement — the SMS thread — are you paying more without realising it? Brands need to check whether this new surface is opt-in or just switched on by default.
Marco: My bigger read is this — Amazon is systematically removing every reason a customer might leave its world to complete a purchase. Browser, app, now text message. The checkout is wherever you are.
Klara: Which makes Amazon less of a marketplace and more of an infrastructure layer for shopping itself.
Marco: Coming up next — our second story of the day.
Marco: TikTok just upgraded its search ads to work like proper paid search — and that changes how ecommerce teams should think about the platform.
Klara: A bit of context first. TikTok has had search ads for a while, but they were pretty basic. You couldn't control much. If someone searched for something on TikTok, your ad might show up — but you had limited ability to target precisely or exclude irrelevant searches. It was more of a rough tool than a precision one.
Marco: That's now changed significantly. TikTok Search Ads have added three things that performance marketers will immediately recognise. Match types — so you can control how closely someone's search needs to match your keyword. Negative keywords — so you can block searches you definitely don't want to pay for. And individual keyword bidding — meaning you can put more budget behind the terms most likely to convert. They've also added impression share data, which tells you what percentage of relevant searches your ad is actually appearing in. Google and Microsoft Ads have had all of this for years. TikTok now has it too.
Klara: This is the moment TikTok search stops being an experiment and becomes a serious budget conversation. For DTC brands — that's direct-to-consumer brands selling without a middleman — this matters a lot. You can now run the same kind of disciplined keyword campaigns on TikTok that you'd run on Google.
Marco: The question I'd ask before moving budget is — what are people actually searching for on TikTok? The intent is different. Someone searching on Google often wants to buy. Someone searching on TikTok might just want to watch. Categories like beauty, fashion, and home will likely see returns faster than, say, B2B software.
Klara: The tool is now there. Whether the audience is in buying mode depends on the category.
Marco: Our third and final story is coming up next.
Marco: Fox Corp has just spent twenty-two billion dollars to buy Roku — and that's a big deal for anyone spending money on streaming TV ads.
Klara: To set the scene — Roku has been one of the most popular ways for advertisers to reach people watching streaming content on their TVs. It operates a bit like an open marketplace for TV ad space. Brands could buy that inventory — that's the available ad slots — programmatically, meaning through automated buying tools, without needing a direct relationship with a broadcaster. That openness made it particularly useful for ecommerce brands who wanted precise targeting without massive TV budgets.
Marco: What's happened now is that Fox has completed the acquisition, cleared regulatory approval in the US, and is folding Roku into its digital platforms division alongside Tubi — its free streaming service — plus Fox One and Red Seat Ventures. Roku brings over eighty million active accounts and its own ad buying platform, called OneView, into that group. Fox now controls an enormous slice of streaming TV advertising in the US.
Klara: My first reaction is that European brands shouldn't dismiss this as an American story. If you're running connected TV campaigns that touch US audiences — or if you're watching where the European streaming ad market is heading — this is a preview of where things go. CTV and retail media are starting to converge. This is exactly what that looks like when it scales.
Marco: The concern I'd flag is around access. Roku worked well because it stayed relatively independent and open. If Fox pulls that inventory closer — turning it into something you can only buy through Fox's own channels — programmatic buyers lose a key entry point.
Klara: Though Fox has strong incentives to keep revenue flowing. Locking out buyers entirely would hurt them too.
Marco: True — but on what terms, and at what price. That's the question heading into the second half of this year.
Marco: The single biggest idea from today — every screen, every message thread, every search bar is becoming a place where someone can buy something and someone can advertise.
Klara: So look at your media mix and ask honestly whether you're only showing up in the places that existed five years ago.