Retail media networks outside Amazon and Walmart staged their first upfront-style pitch event, called Showcase, to court ad buyers, according to Patrick Coffee at the Wall Street Journal. DoorDash CMO Tim Castree told the room that two-thirds of its users open the app without knowing what they want, PayPal Ads pitched the heavy Venmo spenders it calls chief friend officers, and Chase Media Solutions claimed 6% of the US economy runs through JPMorgan transactions. Neither Amazon nor Walmart showed up, and Albertsons Media Collective’s Brian Monahan argued that ad budgets sit with a few players far out of proportion to their share of sales. Buyers want to know where the numbers come from, though, and Ramp97’s Brian Leder said a 500% ROAS is no help if he can’t tell what produced it.
