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Revlon demos Amazon interactive video ads at Advertising Week, Apple targets ad tech with a new block list, and Yazen closes a €50M European health DTC round.
Revlon just gave brands the clearest public proof yet that Amazon's interactive video ads drive real purchases. Meanwhile, Apple's new ad tech block list could quietly break retargeting for thousands of ecommerce brands heading into Q4.
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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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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 worth your time this morning — a real-world case study from Revlon on Amazon's newest video ad formats, Apple's latest move that could quietly break retargeting for a lot of brands, and a €50 million bet on digital health in Europe.
Klara: Big implications across all three. Let's get into it.
Marco: Revlon just gave us one of the clearest public case studies we've seen yet for Amazon's new interactive video ads — and it's worth paying attention to.
Klara: Let's set the scene. For years, video advertising and shopping have lived in separate worlds. You'd watch an ad, feel vaguely inspired, and then maybe — maybe — go searching for the product later. Most of the time, that moment was lost. Amazon has been trying to close that gap with a format that lets you go from watching a video to buying the product without ever leaving.
Marco: And now we have real brand-side proof that it actually works. At Advertising Week New York, Revlon's Chief Digital Marketing Officer Kelly Solomon walked through exactly how the brand used Amazon's interactive video ad units in a live campaign. It's one of the first times a brand has publicly broken down what these ads do in practice — not just in theory. The format links what's called upper-funnel creative — that's brand awareness video, the kind designed to make you feel something — directly to a purchase action. Watch the ad, tap, buy. Done.
Klara: What I find compelling here is that Revlon is a mass-market beauty brand. This isn't a niche luxury label with a tiny, devoted audience. If it works for Revlon, it's a signal that the format can scale.
Marco: Agreed — though I'd say the case study is only the beginning. We still don't have the actual performance numbers in the public domain. Solomon spoke about outcomes, but brands will need their own data before shifting budget.
Klara: True. But for beauty and CPG brands heading into Q4, this is the format to put on your test list now, not after the holidays.
Marco: Up next — our second story of the day.
Marco: Apple has just published a new block list targeting data brokers and ad tech companies that track users across different websites — and for ecommerce brands, this could be a bigger deal than most people have clocked.
Klara: To understand why, you need to remember what happened when Apple launched ATT a few years back. ATT — App Tracking Transparency — was Apple's rule that made apps ask your permission before tracking you. It hit Meta hard. Brands running Facebook ads suddenly lost visibility into who was buying, and a lot of DTC companies had to completely rebuild how they measured their advertising.
Marco: This new block list feels like the next chapter of that story. Apple is now targeting data brokers — companies that collect and sell information about consumers — and ad tech vendors who track people as they move across different websites. The list could expand significantly beyond the initial targets. And this comes on top of the privacy changes already rolling out with iOS 27.
Klara: The part that worries me most is the timing. Brands are finalising their Q4 budgets right now. If you're running programmatic retargeting — that's where you show ads to people who've already visited your site — or if you're using third-party data to build lookalike audiences, the ground could shift under you at exactly the wrong moment.
Marco: I'd actually argue the timing is almost beside the point. The direction of travel has been obvious for years. If you haven't started building first-party data — that's customer information you collect directly, like email sign-ups and purchase history — then Q4 pressure is just making an existing problem more urgent.
Klara: Fair enough. Though "obvious" and "acted on" are two very different things for a lot of smaller European brands.
Marco: They really are. And with GDPR already limiting how European retailers handle data, there's even less room to absorb another hit from this direction.
Klara: Something to watch very closely as Apple fills out that list.
Marco: Our third story is next.
Marco: A Swedish weight loss startup just closed one of the more eye-catching funding rounds in European DTC this year.
Klara: Yazen has been operating in a space that's genuinely hard to build in — digital health. Consumers are increasingly open to managing their health online, but trust is everything. You have to convince people to hand over sensitive personal information and then stay subscribed month after month. The companies that crack that retention problem can build something very durable.
Marco: Yazen has done exactly that — at least convincingly enough for investors. The Stockholm-based startup has just closed a €50 million Series B, led by Verdane, a growth investor that focuses specifically on Nordic and European companies. Yazen runs as a direct-to-consumer, subscription-based weight loss platform. Customers sign up, get access to a digital programme — including, in some cases, GLP-1 medication support, which is the new generation of prescription weight loss drugs that's been dominating health headlines — and stay on a monthly plan. The €50 million round is notable because European venture funding actually fell in Q3 this year. A raise this size, in this climate, is a statement of confidence.
Klara: What strikes me is how much this is a commerce story dressed in health clothing. Yazen is acquiring customers online, converting them through a digital funnel, and retaining them on subscription. That is DTC operating logic applied to a regulated health category. And Verdane clearly sees a path to making this the pan-European player in that space.
Marco: I'd add a small note of caution, though. Subscription health is a tough model to scale across borders. Regulation varies country to country across Europe — what you can prescribe, what you can advertise, how you can handle patient data under GDPR. The funding is real, but the execution complexity is genuinely high.
Klara: That's the challenge, yes. But for DTC operators watching where growth capital is moving in Europe right now — this category is clearly where conviction sits.
Marco: The single biggest thing from today — Apple is quietly redrawing the boundaries of what's possible in digital advertising, and brands that aren't paying attention will feel it before they understand it.
Klara: So take five minutes this week to ask your ad team one question: what happens to our retargeting if third-party data disappears entirely?