For several years now, the operators of retail media networks have been selling advertisers on the considerable virtues of shopper data — the ability to know, with some precision, who bought the laundry detergent and when they might buy it again.
The holding company that has spent the better part of a decade telling anyone who would listen that it was building the advertising industry's most sophisticated data and technology infrastructure now finds itself in a familiar position: being proved right, slowly.
The marketing world has developed a certain weary familiarity with affiliate fraud, the way New Yorkers have learned to walk past scaffolding without looking up.
There was a time, not so long ago, when bringing advertising work inside the corporate walls was presented primarily as an accounting decision — a way to pay fewer agency fees and maintain somewhat more control over one's own brand assets.
The British advertising industry has long believed that if something is worth doing, it is worth forming a committee to measure it, and now it appears that influencer marketing has reached that particular threshold of respectability.
The last time entertainment conglomerates were this eager to pair off, it was the late 2010s, and the industry produced couplings that ranged from the logical (Disney acquiring 21st Century Fox) to the eventually regretted (AT&T acquiring Time Warner, or was it WarnerMedia by then?).