Zero Clicks #9: Solving retail media’s tragic flaw

Every week in Zero Clicks, we explore the interplay of AI, media, and commerce.

When news broke earlier this year that CNET was on the block, I wrote that Best Buy should step in and buy the publisher. Little did I know that the powers that be were miles ahead of me– my inbox blew up with messages from folks on the inside and two months later Best Buy and CNET announced their partnership. While there have been no subsequent retail media + publisher marriages since, the logic and ethos behind the deal were fundamentally correct.

Overall, the convergence of content and commerce hypothesis has seemingly hit rock bottom. M&A activity is slow as both buyer and seller expectations struggle to align with reality, and in-house publisher commerce ambitions are floundering. Hodinkee has wound down its commerce operation, Food 52 is turning to Barstool’s ex-CEO to right the ship, and Hearst’s chief commerce officer has departed the company with little commerce happening on Hearst’s marketplaces.

Perhaps there’s a bit of cope here– hell, I’ve bet my entire career on the notion that content & commerce are a single discipline– but the current cynicism around content and commerce is misguided. The convergence will rapidly accelerate next year, but the real action won’t come from publishers launching successful commerce arms, it will come from retailers largely buying their way into the content business.

Why? Two words: retail media.

Zooming out, there are two things that will be true about retail media in 2025 and beyond:

1) It’s going to get a hell of a lot bigger

2) The novelty will wear off and the channel is going to face existential questions from brands about incrementally

Currently, retail media is rapidly replacing programmatic ad spend as the “nobody got fired for buying IBM” channel for agencies and FORTUNE 1000 marketers to park the slush pile of unallocated ad dollars that aren’t promised to Meta or Google. But while the programmatic-industrial complex was good at simply driving predictable reach and placements in publications that a company’s CEO hopefully reads, retail media networks put up gaudy ROAS numbers, even if it is largely inflated by brand’s reaching customers who were set to buy from them anyway.

In the short term, this is all well and good for Amazon, Walmart, Target, and friends— no marketing leader will turn away from a channel that can drive myopic returns. But in the medium and long term, retail media is on a lightning path to becoming a massive commodity due to its gargantuan mid-funnel problem. While retail media networks can monetize lower funnel search demand and place top of funnel ads across the open web, most lack access to any inventory that actually educates a prospective customer on a product or service.

Thus, if retail media is to continue to be a $100B operation growing at 20% CAGR, it’s going to have to honor the media side of its moniker. The simplest way to do that is for large retail media networks to go shopping for commerce media properties. Lord knows, there are currently some deals to be had in this space in the wake of helpful content update carnage. Combine that with corp dev teams feeling empowered when JPOW takes a machete to interest rates, and the deal juice will start flowing again faster than Eric Adams boarding a Turkish Airlines flight.

For years, the case for a large retailer or brand buying a publisher was largely around bolstering domain authority and SEO traffic. With Google now favoring entities that both create content and directly sell goods or services, that’s now something of a moot point. Today, the business case rests squarely on simply acquiring high-quality editorial that a retailer couldn’t write themselves. Translation: while the multiple on playing the Google game has gone way down, the multiple on crafting great content is still strong. Ironically, the Red Venturesization of CNET ultimately made it less valuable as retail media fuel.

Here, it’s important to acknowledge that the Best Buy-CNET partnership likely hasn’t been a home run to date. While exact numbers on Ziff Davis’s CNET acquisition are hard to come by, the deal was likely somewhere between $100-200M, 60-80% off the $500M 2020 purchase price. If the partnership with Best Buy ads was a major early cash cow, it’s likely that Ziff Davis would have had to pony up quite a bit more than $100M to own such an ascendant asset. Still, it’s early and the strategic rationale behind the deal was right on the money– I still think Best Buy should have just pushed more chips in and bought CNET outright.

Ultimately, to potential brand acquirers, the most valuable publishers will be those who painstakingly and meticulously review products, not those that prosper off of keyword arbitrage schemes. If I was on the growth team of a large retailer, I’d be mining the depths of independent niche media websites to find publishers that excel at writing unbiased content but have been unfairly crushed by Google’s callousness.

While retail media is the most obvious use case, acquiring a publisher could also be a means for a brand to rediscover its initial cult mojo. Having fully ceded the fandom of hardcore running enthusiasts to Hoka and Asics, Nike might want to take a look at buying back into the game. If Outside was willing to listen to offers, RUN would be a particularly interesting fit.

All right, that’s enough of the pedantic analysis–  let’s have some fun and call some 2025 shots for posterity. In addition to a mini-flurry of downmarket retail media networks buying publishing businesses, here are three massive media and commerce deals that will go down next year:

1) Instacart buys Food 52: After Erika Ayers ushers in a vibes and content renaissance at Food52, The Chernin Group will sell the bump as Instacart buys the publisher outright after running up against scale limitations with its New York Times recipe partnership.

2) Walmart pushes all the chips in on creators: To outflank Amazon’s influencer network ambitions, Walmart buys LTK to power Walmart Creator while continuing to run it as a standalone SaaS business. The deal sets off a long overdue chain reaction that leads to several of the large influencer platforms consolidating or getting snapped up by private equity.

3) Satya makes a play for Shopify: Finally, after assembling chess pieces for years, Microsoft announces its intent to purchase Shopify in the biggest software deal in history, lining up a new front in the great antitrust battles that will be fought in 2026.

Brace yourselves, deals are coming.

VP of Content, Storyarb

For better or worse, it seems like nearly every startup founder and corporate executive has been born again as a LinkedIn thought leader. Only time will tell if it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle or for a B2B influencer to enter the kingdom of God.

Behind every corporate Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson are a series of executive ghostwriting agencies that are absolutely watching their money printers go brrrrrr. Led by Morning Brew founder Alex Lieberman, Storyarb is the cream of the crop. In this brave new media landscape, the head of content for Storyarb will probably have their work reach more professional eyeballs than any other gig in B2B media.

GTM Industry Lead, Stripe

As someone who both grinds at a day job, that combines marketing and BD and writes this fairly esoteric newsletter for a living, I occasionally wonder if there is some way to combine these interests into a single pursuit. What if some deep-pocketed software company would pay me medium-big bucks to just dish out hot takes as a means to generate enterprise demand?

Well, lo and behold, Stripe is doing that, hiring for “industry leads” in both insurance and travel. It’s a smart role for the payments giant to open– Stripe has perhaps the strongest brand in Silicon Valley and tech more broadly. But is not necessarily a marquee brand name in the verticals that make up its largest growth opportunities. Furthermore, the company is stacked to the gills with payments and tech experts… adding a few more experts from the verticals they aim to sell into is a smart move that any horizontal SaaS provider should follow.

Editor, Moda Operandi

Given the topic of this newsletter, I’d be remiss not to share at least one interesting brand-side editorial gig, especially given the momentum around commerce-owned editorial operations in beauty and fashion. Glossier has brought Into the Gloss back into the game in a big way, and now Moda is hiring its third editorial team member. Side note, Industry City is the coolest office digs in New York and has an elite array of lunch options.

I guess you could say that legacy media titles just don’t quite have the Allure that they once did– expect more brands to both build in-house and/or buy digital upstarts to own their brand message directly.