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10 minutes of expert insights every weekday. Your morning ritual for staying ahead in retail media.
Are RMNs finally getting the hang of this collaboration thing?
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[00:00:00] Kiri Masters: Well, good morning and welcome back to Retail Media Breakfast Club. A quick note if you're listening to this on Wednesday, September 23rd, we are an hour late coming out with the pod today, airing at seven AM Eastern instead of six AM Eastern, and that is because today's [00:00:15] edition was delayed by a media embargo from Best Buy, which we are going to talk about in the show.
[00:00:23] So I'm gonna begin by talking about toddlers and how toddlers do this thing called [00:00:30] parallel play, and that's where they're quite happy to play sitting next to another child, but they don't wanna share. They don't engage with the other child. They just play their own games sitting right [00:00:45] next to them.
[00:00:46] Collaborative play, where children play together and engage with each other, is more fun, but it comes later. It takes a little bit of practice to get that right, a little bit of hair-pulling, a little bit of [00:01:00] squealing required to get the hang of that. And two announcements this week, I think maybe within even a day of each other, puts retail media somewhere in that transition from parallel play [00:01:15] to collaborative play.
[00:01:17] First one is Best Buy, who is now selling Amazon's Fire TV ad inventory, and secondly, Instacart selling Gopuff's delivery [00:01:30] speed and Gopuff also tapping into Instacart's retail media ad infrastructure. Any hair-pulling, any squealing is so far shielded from view. Today, I'm gonna share a quick read [00:01:45] on these two announcements.
[00:01:47] What is in it for each party to actually team up? What it means for media buyers, and where it puts our industry on the journey of real collaboration. [00:02:00] Let's jump in
[00:02:00]
[00:02:02] Kiri Masters: So the first news, which is, uh, just ca-came out today, is that Best Buy and Amazon are expanding their Fire TV partnership, which they have actually [00:02:15] been partnered up on since twenty eighteen.
[00:02:17] So this is a long-standing partnership, but there is a new addition here, which is that
[00:02:23] ~Insignia, which is Best Buy's, um, house brand of TVs~
[00:02:23] ~Is now going to have Best Buy ads selling ad placements on... Oh, sorry~
[00:02:23] Insignia TVs, which is Best Buy's house brand of televisions, is going to continue to have [00:02:30] Fire TV be the exclusive TV software on those TV sets, and that Best Buy ads now will begin selling ad placements on Fire TV across all Insignia sets, both new [00:02:45] and those already in homes. So instead of Amazon just selling the ad placements on Fire TV on Insignia TV sets, now Best Buy is going to be able to sell ad placements on Insignia TV sets through [00:03:00] Fire TV.
[00:03:01] And starting next year, Best Buy will use Amazon Ads programmatic technology to actually, run those campaigns to allow, media buyers to plan, manage, and measure campaigns. They're going to be [00:03:15] riding on Amazon Ads programmatic technology rails. So what's in it for Amazon and what's in it for Best Buy?
[00:03:23] So first of all, what's in it for Amazon? Well, Amazon gets to lock in its operating system [00:03:30] on Best Buy's house brand of TVs for another multi-year term and keeps that device relationship and the underlying data. Fire TV is an important part of Amazon's [00:03:45] CTV value prop, and this is an important partnership for them to continue
[00:03:51] Presumably Amazon gets to take a cut of the media spend coming through that channel that Best Buy is now selling, and also charges [00:04:00] for the technology that Best Buy is now using for that as well
[00:04:05] Now what Amazon gains from this is a second sales force actually selling that same inventory, [00:04:15] potentially to a new group of media buyers as well. Consumer electronics brands that buy Best Buy ads for shopper marketing or have an existing deep relationship there, and they are [00:04:30] not buying on Amazon Ads platform.
[00:04:33] They're not buying CTV ads. I'm not sure how incremental or large that potential audience is, but
[00:04:43] This is ultimately a [00:04:45] way for Amazon to access incremental media buyers that might not be interested in buying through Amazon DSP directly. Again, I'm not sure how significant that audience is. This might be more about the [00:05:00] technology licensing and being able to lock in Best Buy for a further term.
[00:05:05] What's in it for Best Buy? Well, Best Buy gets to sell ad space that up until now only Amazon could sell. These placements inside of the [00:05:15] Fire TV interface, things like the autoplay banner above the fold, inline banners, screensavers, sponsored tiles, sponsored content rows, all of those placements via Fire [00:05:30] TV, all of those placements run on Amazon's software, so they've always been Amazon's inventory to sell through its own managed service or DSP.
[00:05:39] And now Best Buy gets to sell that inventory as well and bundle that [00:05:45] into The packages that they are pitching to brands. Best Buy also gets to put their own audience signals and sales data on top
[00:05:54] this means that media buyers can now buy specific audiences that only Best Buy has access to, like [00:06:00] households that bought an Insignia TV from Best Buy, they are five years into their laptop refresh cycle, or they have bought-brought a device into Geek Squad last month.
[00:06:11] So a lot of really rich behavioral data that is very important [00:06:15] in the electronics world, where there are defined refresh cycles and they know all of those refresh cycles but to the household level. So Amazon knows what kind of TV is [00:06:30] registered to an account, but it doesn't have all of this in-store purchase history or repair records that Best Buy has.
[00:06:39] And so
[00:06:40] Those signals are really the product. These are better [00:06:45] kind of signals to use in CTV than age and demographic and search data. They're real behavioral signals that point to where a consumer is in their refresh cycle. What it means for a media buyer, why is this [00:07:00] a better value proposition?
[00:07:01] So first of all, it's that targeting that no one else has, the refresh cycles, the repair history
[00:07:06] There's also the sale that it closes. It's a Best Buy sale. That same impression, if you bought it through Amazon [00:07:15] DSP, it would report against an Amazon purchase.
[00:07:18] If you're a brand who's selling through Best Buy, including in-store sales, you wanna see the Best Buy sales come through. So It [00:07:30] is a different type of transaction loop that Best Buy is able to close versus buying that media through Amazon. So maybe a different, you know- category of media buyer is gonna be interested in this one
[00:07:41] Now here is the catch. I think that both Best [00:07:45] Buy ads and Amazon ads can now both sell against the same household on the same screen. They can both sell the same inventory and Neither one of them is really gonna de-dupe the other one. So that will be the catch, [00:08:00] I guess. But I, imagine that a consumer electronics brand is going to be the primary media buyer for this If they're really interested in closing the loop versus non-endemic brands might be more interested in [00:08:15] buying through Amazon ads. Costco isn't scaling its RMN with legacy ad tech and manual solutions. It's leaning into a [00:08:30] cloud-centric composable stack. As part of the Costco Velocity Network, GrowthLoop empowers the retail media team to build audiences directly from the Data Cloud, [00:08:45] enabling faster activation, greater relevance, and better performance, all while maintaining privacy and governance standards.
[00:08:55] The result? Exceptional value and experience for Costco [00:09:00] members and better ROI for brand advertisers. Learn why the GrowthLoop Composable Commerce Media Solution was the right choice for Costco's Velocity Network. Visit [00:09:15] go.growthloop.com/breakfast. That's go.growthloop.com/breakfast
[00:09:23]
[00:09:23] Kiri Masters: So that is the first major partnership collaboration announcement of the week. The second one is [00:09:30] Instacart and Gopuff, and this is, in their words, an industry first. I think it's very interesting just because of how similar these two companies are in their category There's a lot of competitive overlap here.
[00:09:44] [00:09:45] And so what is happening is that Gopuff is going to join the Instacart marketplace. So customers will be able to order
[00:09:53] Through Instacart and have their orders fulfilled from Gopuff's [00:10:00] network of small local warehouses in the US as fast as fifteen minutes. Gopuff owns BevMo, the alcohol delivery service which was already inside of Instacart, and this new deal puts [00:10:15] the whole of Gopuff inside the Instacart marketplace.
[00:10:18] Gopuff is also going to adopt Carrot Ads as its primary ad tech platform. That is Instacart's white label ad tech [00:10:30] platform to run Gopuff's advertising on its own app and site
[00:10:36] GoPuff's own ad team is going to c-continue selling bespoke campaigns directly to brand partners as well. So what's [00:10:45] in it for Instacart? Well, they get the fifteen-minute delivery promise that GoPuff can offer without building any warehouses of their own. Instacart's model is a shopper picking from a partner's store, and if they want to deliver on an [00:11:00] instant delivery promise, they need to have inventory sitting locally that they can control.
[00:11:04] Now, Instacart's closest competitor, DoorDash, closed that gap a year ago by opening , DashMart Fulfillment Services to retailers.
[00:11:14] [00:11:15] And this is where fast delivery and instant delivery, the definitions matter because they're different types of shopping occasions. Shopping occasions also attract different [00:11:30] ad businesses. A weekly stock-up that you would do with Instacart generates one visit a week, let's say, whereas a snack run is more frequent and the audience skews [00:11:45] younger generally.
[00:11:46] And so this is a segment that Instacart wasn't really able to tap into previously and is now going to be able to do that through GoPuff. Now, that is on the sort of [00:12:00] e-commerce and fulfillment side. On the advertising side, obviously, Instacart picks up a new ad service for the Carrot Ads network, which they've had for a few years now, and they have, you know, quite a large number of retailers running on Carrot [00:12:15] Ads, but this is a, a new banner for them.
[00:12:19] And to me, it also answers a standing objection to Carrot Ads, which is the frenemy debate. Instacart has a [00:12:30] marketplace of its own, a delivery platform of its own, no less, and therefore competes with some of the retailers that it sells its technology to. And this week, Instacart signed a company that it competes with head-on in [00:12:45] delivery, which I think is a maj-major signal to the market that they can be trusted, or at least that GoPuff trusts them So this is a major win for Instacart.
[00:12:55] Now, what's in it for Gopuff? Well, retail media technology. [00:13:00] Gopuff has explored a number of different approaches to retail media technology. They originally launched on CitrusAd back in 2021, and then they brought their ad platform in-house in [00:13:15] 2024. And now in 2026, they're moving onto Instacart Carrot Ads.
[00:13:21] Now, I don't have any intel on why the in-house build didn't hold up, but
[00:13:28] This is the decision [00:13:30] that they ultimately made in 2026, which is that at least at this point in time, renting versus buying is the better model for Gopuff. Gopuff also gains access to [00:13:45] 9,000 advertisers that currently buy ads through the Instacart platform. Those are 9,000 advertisers that it would otherwise have to sell to one at a time
[00:13:56] The ceiling on an ads business without self-serve is [00:14:00] how many brands a sales team can personally reach, And that is a sales problem that building your own ad tech doesn't fix. Now, what's in it for the media buyer? Well, a retailer that turns up inside an ad console that you [00:14:15] already use on terms that you already negotiated With creative specs that you're already building is a pretty easy on button an existing media buyer, they also get a shopping [00:14:30] occasion that they haven't been able to buy through Instacart before. They're able to tap into this convenience, late night, impulse market. That is a different kind of audience and a different occasion to the weekly stock-up.
[00:14:43] Media buyers get [00:14:45] consistent measurement across banners, and this is something that there's a lot of tension remaining in the industry that media buyers wanna see the same type of measurement, the same type of look back period, the same way of measuring results across their retailer banners. And [00:15:00] so Gopuff can now be compared like to like against the rest of the portfolio of retailers that an advertiser is buying across
[00:15:07] Okay, so what next? Where does this leave us? Collaborative play. Let's come back to the toddlers and their collaborative play. [00:15:15] Collaborative play works because each child wants something that the other has, and that's the shape of both of these deals. Best Buy doesn't own CTV supply, and they went to the company that makes the software that is running on its [00:15:30] own televisions.
[00:15:31] Instacart doesn't own warehouses and went to the company that does. Now, these are concessions to be sure. Gopuff now runs its ad business on a competitor's technology Instacart's fifteen-minute delivery [00:15:45] promise lives on someone else's buildings. And from February next year, Best Buy will be selling inventory that it doesn't control on a stack that it doesn't own.
[00:15:54] Still, both of these deals are positive steps in my view. They represent [00:16:00] retailers leaning into their strengths and making their media easier to buy and to measure. Right now, everyone seems to be getting what they wanted. The tantrums, if they come, will come at renewal. [00:16:15] Thanks for listening, and I'll catch you tomorrow
[00:16:17]