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Meta launches Ads Super Burst for reserved feed windows, Dunelm reports 41% digital revenue in Q1, and Whatnot makes its live commerce push into Germany.
Meta is letting brands book feed ad windows like TV prime-time slots. Dunelm just proved homewares can cross 41% digital revenue. Both numbers should change how you plan.
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: Three stories lined up for you this morning — and they all hit differently.
Klara: Meta is changing how brands buy reach on social. Live commerce is growing up fast in Europe. And Dunelm just dropped a number that should make every homewares brand rethink their digital strategy.
Marco: Old assumptions getting tested across the board today.
Klara: Let's dig in.
Marco: Meta just announced a new ad product that looks a lot like buying a TV prime-time slot — but inside your social media feed.
Klara: To understand why that matters, you need to know how Meta's advertising has always worked. Brands bid against each other in real time — an auction — and the highest bidder wins the ad slot. It's fast and flexible, but it's unpredictable. You can't guarantee when your ads will run or how many people will see them at once.
Marco: That's exactly what Meta is changing. They've launched something called "Ads Super Burst." The idea is simple — advertisers can now reserve concentrated windows of ad space in the feed, like booking a prime-time TV spot in advance. You know when your ads will run, and you get a guaranteed volume of eyeballs in a short window. That's a fundamentally different way of buying.
Klara: And the reason this is interesting is who Meta is actually talking to here. This isn't aimed at small DTC brands tweaking their daily ad spend. This is Meta going to big brand marketing teams and CFOs — the people who grew up buying TV — and saying: we speak your language now.
Marco: For DTC brands, though, I think there's a real question worth sitting with. A burst of guaranteed reach sounds attractive, especially if you're launching something or running a seasonal campaign. But does it actually replace what you used to get from content going viral organically? That reach was free. This isn't.
Klara: I'd put it slightly differently. The cost question matters, but so does the planning question. TV-style buying gives you predictability. You can build a launch plan around it. Auction-based buying never gave you that certainty — which is genuinely limiting for bigger campaigns.
Marco: Both things can be true. Predictability has value. The price just has to match it.
Klara: Worth watching as more brands start testing it. Now — our next story is up.
Marco: Whatnot's Germany boss is making a bold claim — live commerce is leaving its niche roots behind and going mainstream.
Klara: To set the scene: live commerce is essentially shopping via livestream. A seller broadcasts in real time, shows off products, chats with viewers, and people buy on the spot. Until recently, it's been dominated by collectibles — think trading cards, rare sneakers, that kind of thing. It built a passionate audience, but a pretty narrow one.
Marco: Whatnot is one of the bigger live commerce platforms, and Isabell Weiser, their General Manager for Germany, is now publicly arguing that this model works far beyond collectibles. The case she's making is that the key to live commerce isn't the product — it's the seller. Personality, authenticity, the feeling that you trust the person holding the camera. That's what drives people to actually buy.
Klara: Germany is a really interesting test case for this. It's one of Europe's largest ecommerce markets, but it has been noticeably slow to warm to live shopping. Shoppers there tend to be cautious, research-led, quite sceptical of anything that feels like a hard sell. So the argument that *personality* rather than promotional pressure is the conversion driver — that framing actually makes sense for a German audience.
Marco: I think it's the right market positioning. But I'd want to see category data before getting too excited. Fashion and beauty will be natural fits. Home goods, electronics — much harder to sell live without a lot of trust already built up.
Klara: That's a fair challenge, but Whatnot is also directly competing with Amazon Live and TikTok Shop here. The fact that it's leaning into a localised, seller-first model rather than just copying what works in the US or UK — that's the smarter play in Germany specifically.
Marco: One to watch as it develops. Coming up — our final story today.
Marco: Dunelm — the UK homewares chain — just reported that 41% of its total sales in the first quarter came through digital channels.
Klara: To put that in context: homewares is one of those categories where conventional wisdom said online would always struggle. Sofas, curtains, cushions — these are things people want to touch, measure, see in person before committing. Physical stores were supposed to have an unbeatable advantage here.
Marco: Dunelm has been around for forty years. It built its entire reputation on big out-of-town stores where families spend a Saturday afternoon picking out bedding and lampshades. So 41% of revenue now flowing through digital — while overall sales are also growing — that's not cannibalisation. Digital is bringing in money on top of what stores were already doing.
Klara: That last part is really important. When digital growth simply pulls customers away from stores, retailers end up in the same place, just with higher running costs. When both channels grow together, that's when the business actually gets stronger. Dunelm seems to be managing that balance.
Marco: For me, the wider signal here is the one every incumbent retailer should be paying attention to. If a high-consideration, high-basket-value category like homewares — where a single purchase might be a couple of hundred pounds — can cross 41% digital, then any retailer still treating their website as a secondary channel is genuinely running out of excuses.
Klara: I'd add one nuance though. Dunelm has invested consistently in connecting its physical and digital experience — things like reserving stock online, checking availability before visiting a store. The number isn't just about having a website. It's about making both channels feel like one joined-up thing.
Marco: Which is harder than it sounds — and still rarer than it should be.
Marco: The single biggest idea from today — reach is no longer something you earn, it's something you can plan for, from Meta's ad windows to live commerce to a homewares brand quietly winning online.
Klara: So ask yourself: which part of your customer journey still feels like guesswork — and what would it look like to make it deliberate?