Infillion Builds Its Stack, Amazon Blocks Meta’s AI Shopper, and Google Keeps AdX

Infillion is acquiring Foursquare, adding location and visitation data to a growing list of acquisitions that includes MediaMath, Catalina, Gimbal, and TrueX.

Foursquare brings more than 100 million points of interest and data covering 250 million U.S. devices. Add that to MediaMath’s ad tech, Catalina’s purchase data, Gimbal’s location capabilities, and TrueX’s attention-based advertising, and Infillion has assembled a pretty interesting combination of assets.

Infillion is building the full stack, and I’m not sure anyone noticed… until now.

Read ExchangeWire

Retail media networks were built to drive conversions, but now they want a bigger piece of brand budgets. Retailers like Walmart, Kroger, and Instacart are expanding beyond onsite ads through partnerships with streaming, social, and programmatic platforms, allowing brands to use retailer first-party data across the funnel.

The problem is that the economics and measurement haven’t caught up. Most RMN spending is still tied to performance goals, while proving brand impact can require expensive tests, longer timelines, and, in some cases, $500,000+ in spend. Add in data locked behind spending thresholds and internal battles over whether shopper, trade, or brand teams should fund campaigns, and the challenge becomes clear. Retail media has the capabilities to become a brand channel. Advertisers still need a better reason to treat it like one.

Read Digiday

Meta’s AI agent Muse can no longer shop on Amazon, which I think tells us where agentic commerce is headed. If AI agents start choosing products and making purchases for consumers, Amazon isn’t going to casually hand that customer relationship to Meta, Google, OpenAI, or anyone else.

This isn’t really about an AI bot buying the wrong pair of shoes. It’s about who controls the shopping journey, the data, and, eventually, the advertising dollars.

Read TechCrunch

Google gets to keep AdX and DFP after its antitrust loss, although it now has six years of rules designed to make the stack more open. AdX will have to bid into competing publisher ad servers, Prebid gets deeper integration, and publishers should have more flexibility.

But here’s the part I find much more interesting: While regulators are spending years trying to open up Google’s ad tech stack, AI companies are busy building their own closed ecosystems. ChatGPT is bringing together discovery, recommendations, ads, and potentially transactions without users ever needing to leave.

We spent two decades complaining about Google owning too much of the advertising stack. Now everyone seems to be racing to build the next version of it.

Read Digiday

Women’s sports is creating a growing advertising business, and the economics are getting interesting. More viewers means more valuable media rights, more ad inventory, and more competition for sponsorships. But compared with established men’s leagues, brands can still potentially get in earlier and build larger partnerships before pricing catches up with audience growth.

At Brandweek, Scripps Sports and the PWHL also highlighted opportunities beyond traditional game-day spots, including athlete content, social, original programming, and league-wide integrations. The PWHL is particularly interesting because its single-entity structure allows brands to potentially activate across all 12 teams through one partnership.

If audiences keep growing, CPMs, sponsorship costs, and media rights should follow. For advertisers, the opportunity is getting in while the economics are still developing.

Read ADWEEK

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