Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and Pencil, The Brandtech Group’s generative AI-powered marketing platform, have announced a global strategic partnership to accelerate enterprise adoption of AI in marketing. Under the partnership, BCG will provide strategic guidance, operating model transformation, and change management to support AI implementation across marketing functions. Meanwhile, Pencil will serve as the creative genAI engine, and Brandtech will deliver the technology infrastructure and creative automation needed to integrate AI tools.
Amazon’s retail media ad revenue is set to exceed $60 billion this year, according to WARC. The latest WARC Media forecasts suggest that Amazon will earn $60.6 billion in retail media ad revenue in 2025 – not including spend with Amazon-owned properties such as Prime Video and Twitch – and is on course to climb to $69.7 billion in 2026. Amazon’s ad revenue accounts for just 9.2% of its total revenue, but it continues to post significant double-digit year-on-year growth. It achieved +17.7% ad growth in Q1 2025, outpacing the +16% expansion forecast for the global retail media market, per WARC Media. This ad growth also surpassed its overall sales growth for all revenue (8.6%).
Intuit, the financial technology platform behind Mailchimp, Quickbooks, Credit Karma, and TurboTax, has released a report exploring how the traditional retail calendar is being reshaped. Created in partnership with Canvas8, ‘The New E-Commerce Calendar’ draws insights from more than 9,000 surveyed shoppers across 13 countries (including more than 1,000 in the UK), supplementing this data with expert insights from six retail and behavioural science experts. It was found that 78% of the ‘moments’ that make up the New E-Commerce Calendar aren’t driven by price promotions. In fact, 71% of UK shoppers believe discounts around retail calendar moments are often exaggerated. Meanwhile, 42% of shoppers were influenced by website product reviews to make a purchase in the last two years – the highest across all nine regions surveyed. For marketers, the end-of-year Christmas rush and Boxing Day sales now account for just 10% of annual engagement opportunities. Furthermore, 39% of shoppers worldwide are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of sales and promotions, leading 25% to actively avoid shopping during major sales events. Globally, loyalty reward perks have prompted a third (33%) of shoppers to make purchases in the last two years. This rises to 43% amongst UK shoppers – the joint-highest across all nine regions surveyed.
Ad tech platform Equativ has announced that it has blocked all made for advertising (MFA) inventory across its global exchange, including both Equativ and Sharethrough platforms. The company is leveraging Jounce Media data to identify MFA sites and has built filters to remove them across both open exchange and deal spend. By removing MFAs automatically from its full exchange, Equativ aims to reduce waste, improve performance, and deliver more value to advertisers and publishers. The move aligns with its broader environmental strategy to reduce the carbon footprint of programmatic advertising while simultaneously promoting responsible media buying.
A third (30%) of UK marketers say their organisation struggles to balance the use of AI with human creativity in major campaigns, according to the ‘Optimize Everything’report from digital experience platform Optimizely. The report, based on a study of 100 marketers and 1000 consumers in the UK, reveals that, while 78% of marketers plan to increase their use of AI-generated content for seasonal campaigns, more than half of consumers (57%) say this content feels ‘impersonal’ and ‘repetitive.’ Meanwhile, 56% believe brands rely too heavily on AI and fail to deliver genuinely personalised experiences. Almost a quarter of marketers (24%) admit that AI-generated decisions often lack human oversight, leading to inconsistencies, while 16% say that the output doesn’t match their brand’s tone of voice. At the same time, 41% of marketers say that better integration of AI with their marketing tools is their biggest opportunity for optimisation this year, and over half (53%) want a more unified system that connects AI with content, personalisation, and experimentation.
Promotions software platform Talon.One has become a Shopify Premier Tier partner. The partnership has seen Talon.One integrate its promotions and loyalty engine into the commerce platform provider. Shopify’s Enterprise customers are now able to deliver targeted, data-driven incentives based on customer data, geography, and behaviour; and create multi-market and multi-brand loyalty programs, gamified reward, and behaviour-triggered experiences.
