Why advertisers are betting on retailers like Kroger and CVS

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Why advertisers are betting on retailers like Walmart and CVS

The pandemic has been a boon to marketers that sell essential items and invested early in e-commerce. And it's also been a boon to retailers like Walmart and Target that realized they could use their sites to sell advertising alongside packaged goods.

Patrick Coffee and Tanya Dua report that as marketers use their ad dollars to drive e-commerce, they're looking to these retail alternatives. Key points:

• Marketers are desperate to find alternatives to the all-powerful Amazon, with its byzantine ad sales structure, fees, and sheer dominance.
• Places like eBay, CVS, and Instacart have opened for advertising business in recent years and are seen as having advantages over Amazon, like service, big store footprints, and neutral selling platforms.
• They might not be toppling Amazon off its perch just yet, but the longer the pandemic drags on, the more likely people's shift to online shopping — and advertiser's new habits — are likely to stick.
• The biggest losers? Traditional media like TV, whose viewership is declining and that aren't performance-driven like commerce platforms.

Read the rest here: Ad insiders say retailers like Walmart, CVS, and Instacart are starting to chip away at Amazon's advertising stronghold in the pandemic

Twitch's ad push

People are starting to accept that gamers aren't a monolithic group of young guys in their parents' basement.

Lauren Johnson got ahold of slides from a new pitch deck Amazon is taking out to advertisers as it ramps up ad sales on its live-streaming platform, Twitch.

Amazon wants advertisers to know, among other things, that Twitch users are largely over 18 (presumably with money to spend) and are interested in lots of other things (They watch TV! They cook!)

Read the rest here: Leaked pitch deck slides reveal new data about Twitch as Amazon pitches the video site to take on Google and Facebook

Agency workers, unite

Ad agency work is notorious for grinding down people early in their careers and its lack of job stability. It's only gotten worse in the pandemic, when agencies have laid off thousands as clients have gutted their budgets.

So you'd think agencies would be fertile ground for labor unions, which have already had success organizing digital media editorial workers.

This is despite the fact that their work, like agencies, can be rift with internal competition and frequent job changes, factors that could be seen as working against a successful organizing effort. For that matter, few if any US agencies have unions.

So it's interesting to see Blue State, a WPP firm that got its start helping elect President Barack Obama, announce it was forming a union under the CWA.

It's worth remembering that unions helped set standards for pay and layoffs procedures at digital media companies but weren't necessarily able to save jobs from the economic pressures falling on the industry.

Read Patrick's story here: In what would be a first for the ad industry, WPP-owned Blue State said it was forming a union

Other stories we're reading:

• Read the pitch deck that an agency vet has used to sell what he called the 'Siri for marketers,' landing clients including Microsoft, Kraft-Heinz, and Chipotle
• How much YouTube pays influencers for 100,000, 1 million, and 150 million views, according to top creators
• Experts think TikTok's tie-up with Oracle and Walmart gives it a route into film, TV, books, and merch
• Inside the controversial underworld of sneaker 'bots,' where coded scripts resell for thousands of dollars and Twitter monitors can make or break a release
• Mirakl, a startup that helps launch online marketplaces, has piggy-backed Amazon's success to become the newest tech unicorn after a deal to raise $300 million

Thanks for reading, and see you next week!

— Lucia