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Albertsons loses retail media lead Brian Monahan, expands enterprise ChatGPT use, and Cotswold Outdoor connects online and in-store ad networks via Broadsign.
Albertsons is making headlines twice today — a senior retail media exit and an enterprise-wide ChatGPT rollout at the same grocery giant. Then Cotswold Outdoor shows Europe how to unify digital and in-store retail media.
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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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Your 8-minute briefing on the platforms, players, and profits driving digital commerce today. Hosted by Marco and Klara.
Marco: Good morning — we've got a packed agenda today, and honestly, it all links together in ways that snuck up on us.
Klara: We're starting in the US grocery aisle — a big leadership exit, an AI expansion, and a retail media shake-up all happening at the same company.
Marco: Then we're heading to the UK, where Cotswold Outdoor is taking retail media into physical stores.
Klara: Let's get into it.
Marco: Albertsons just lost the person running its retail media advertising business — and the timing is awkward.
Klara: Let's back up for a second. Retail media networks are advertising businesses that retailers build on top of their own platforms. So when you see a sponsored product at the top of a supermarket's website, that's retail media. Albertsons — one of the biggest grocery chains in the US — built its own version called the Albertsons Media Collective, and it's been pushing hard to compete with the big players.
Marco: The big players being Walmart and Kroger, who both run serious advertising networks that brands pay into. Albertsons wanted a seat at that same table. Brian Monahan, who came in from the big agency world — he was at Dentsu — was the executive leading that push. And now he's gone. Leadership is shifting under the company's CMO, Emily Turner, following his departure.
Klara: What makes this interesting isn't just one person leaving. It's the moment it's happening. Brands are deciding right now where to put their retail media budgets for Q4 — that's the October to December period, the most valuable time of year for retailers. You want stability and a clear pitch when those conversations are happening.
Marco: And a leadership gap doesn't help that pitch. If you're a performance marketer — someone managing where ad money goes — and your contact at Albertsons just left, that's a reason to pause.
Klara: Though to be fair, networks don't collapse because one executive exits. The infrastructure is still there. The question is whether this slows the sales momentum they'd built.
Marco: True — but in a competitive market, momentum matters. Walmart and Kroger aren't slowing down.
Klara: Worth keeping an eye on how this settles going into the back half of the year.
Marco: Next story — let's keep moving.
Marco: Same company, very different story — Albertsons is now rolling out ChatGPT across its entire business, not just testing it in a corner.
Klara: A bit of context. Albertsons already had a relationship with OpenAI before this announcement. But there's a big difference between running a pilot — a small trial — and committing to enterprise-wide deployment, which means the technology is being used across the whole organisation, not just one team.
Marco: And that's what's happening here. Albertsons is expanding its OpenAI partnership so that ChatGPT is embedded across ecommerce strategy and broader operational functions. We're talking about how the business manages its online operations, its supplier relationships, and potentially how it thinks about targeting — deciding which ads to show which customers.
Klara: What strikes me about this is the timing. We just talked about a senior advertising executive leaving. And now the same company is announcing it's weaving AI into the core of how it works. You have to ask — is this a coincidence, or is there a bigger restructuring happening, one where AI is quietly taking on work that used to require more people?
Marco: That's the interesting read. Most retailers are still at the stage of asking whether AI is worth exploring. Albertsons is past that conversation. This is a company embedding the technology into everyday decisions.
Klara: Though I'd be cautious about overstating it. Deploying ChatGPT across a business doesn't automatically mean better decisions. The outputs are only as good as the questions you ask and the data you feed in. Plenty of companies have rolled out new technology and seen limited results.
Marco: Agreed — but the direction of travel is still significant. When one of America's largest grocery chains moves from experimenting to integrating, other retailers notice.
Klara: Something to watch closely across the rest of the year.
Marco: Our next story is up — let's get to it.
Marco: Cotswold Outdoor Group — the UK outdoor clothing and gear retailer — has just taken its retail media network off the screen and into its physical shops.
Klara: A bit of background. Until now, retail media has mostly lived online. Sponsored product listings, banner ads, targeted promotions on a retailer's website. But there's always been a gap — what happens when that same customer walks into a store? The screens on the shop floor weren't connected to anything the digital advertising team was running.
Marco: Cotswold Outdoor has now closed that gap. They've partnered with two technology companies — Broadsign and IUF — to connect their existing online retail media business to in-store digital screens. The technical term for how this works is programmatic digital out-of-home — which just means the screen ads in physical stores are now being bought and sold automatically through the same kind of trading system used for online ads. What's notable is that Cotswold Outdoor is one of the first UK specialty retailers to formally tie both sides together into a single system.
Klara: And for brands that sell through Cotswold Outdoor — think outdoor clothing labels, equipment manufacturers — this opens up something new. You could, in theory, run a campaign that follows a customer from the moment they browse online to the moment they're standing in the shop deciding whether to pick something up.
Marco: Which is a genuinely powerful idea. The same customer, the same message, across two different environments.
Klara: Though I'd want to see the actual scale here. Cotswold Outdoor has a loyal customer base, but it's not a mass-market retailer. For a brand to build meaningful reach, they'd need this model adopted by a lot more retailers, not just one.
Marco: That's the fair challenge — but someone has to go first. If this works for Cotswold Outdoor, it becomes the blueprint. Mid-sized UK retailers will be watching closely, and brands selling through wholesale channels should start asking their retail partners when they're planning to follow.
Marco: The single biggest thing from today — Albertsons is simultaneously losing leadership and betting hard on AI, and those two things together tell you how much pressure retail media is under right now.
Klara: And Cotswold Outdoor is the quiet reminder that the most interesting retail media moves are happening in places most people aren't watching.