In this episode of Retail Right Now, Total Retail's Joe Keenan and Marie Albiges discuss the recently released 2025 Best Digital Gift Card Programs report, produced by NAPCO Research in conjunction with Blackhawk Network. This eighth annual report is the most comprehensive assessment of the digital gift card industry in the market. Keenan and Albiges…

Nike announced a series of leadership changes and restructuring on Monday, including the retirement of its current president of consumer, product and brand. The company is restructuring its consumer, product and brand leadership into three separate areas: consumer and sport, marketing, and product creation. As a result, Heidi O'Neill, Nike's president of consumer, product and…

Another Shoptalk has come and gone. As usual, we saw one topic garnering more attention than almost every other one combined. For 2025, that topic was agentic artificial intelligence. It’s been the topic du jour ever since, and for good reason — the tech is legitimately moving forward as rapidly as I’ve ever seen. However,…

For years, direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands have followed a familiar playbook: pour money into search and social, optimize for conversions, and scale what works. However, that formula is getting harder to sustain. Platform saturation, rising costs, and tighter privacy regulations are forcing brands to rethink their media strategies. Growth still requires performance, but now it also…

Leading retailers are interested in personalization efforts that drive the “right” customer behaviors. In marketing, the right messages, delivered at the right time to the right consumer and featuring easy-to-act-upon content result in more revenue at a better margin than non-personalized mass messaging. However, the aim of modern marketing efforts isn't about delivering personalization per…