Marketing

In its 50-year history, Costco has never seen such demand for gas. Many of its stations have been so overwhelmed that they've had to call in tanker trucks multiple times a day to avoid running dry, Costco said this week during its quarterly earnings call. As prices have surged above $4 nationwide — and above…

Here's the paradox no one in retail is talking about enough: retailers are pouring billions into artificial intelligence that runs on first-party data at the exact moment consumers are reconsidering whether to share it. By the end of 2026, AI-driven search, personalization and discovery will increasingly shape how consumers find products, assess brands, and make…

I sit in a lot of usability sessions for AudioEye, a digital accessibility platform. One has stuck with me. A woman who is blind was checking out on a retail site, navigating with a screen reader. Screen readers turn a page's underlying code into speech: a properly labeled button announces as "Place Order, button"; an…

Most email strategies are still built around campaigns, but performance is coming from somewhere else. Automated flows make up just 6 percent of sends, yet generate $513 per 1,000 emails compared to $62 for campaigns. That is an 8x difference. And this pattern shows up consistently across North American e-commerce brands. The math is clear:…

Between the Super Bowl, the Winter Olympics, and the NBA All-Star Game, winter 2026 drove an influx of competitive campaigns with significant budgets. Super Bowl LX ad rates hit a record $8 million for a 30-second spot, and Milan Cortina 2026 became the highest-grossing Winter Olympics of all time. For many marketers, these tentpole events…

Retailers entered 2026 bracing for a slowdown, with a clear expectation that younger consumers, particularly Gen Z, would pull back on discretionary spending. So far, however, the reality has been quite different. Rather than tightening their belts, younger consumers are showing a greater willingness to spend than their older counterparts, according to new research surveying…

In episode 508 of Total Retail Talks, Editor-in-Chief Joe Keenan interviews Tyler Lusebrink, head of brand partnerships for retail media network RedVest Media at ACE Hardware, the world's largest hardware cooperative. Listen in as Lusebrink discusses retail media’s rapid growth (1:20) and how measurement is shifting to decision-driven approaches with closed-loop outcomes and real-time optimization (3:00).…

Retail doesn't get a slow season anymore. E-commerce keeps compressing the calendar, driving nonstop demand across channels, and the pressure to keep up is relentless. In response, retailers are turning to artificial intelligence. Gartner found that 91 percent of service leaders are under pressure to implement it to improve both efficiency and customer satisfaction. However,…

With millions of Americans expected to travel this Memorial Day weekend when gas prices are historically high, spending both in-person and online are expected to be higher than ever. In an email to Chain Store Age, Adobe predicted that consumers would spend an estimated $10.8 billion online during the three-day weekend (May 23-25), representing a…

Anyone who operates a loyalty program knows that they’re designed to influence buying behavior ...  human buying behavior. A customer remembers their points balance, activates an offer, and checks the app before checkout. That model is showing its age. Artificial intelligence agents are actively making real purchase decisions on behalf of consumers, both within the…