August 20th-August 26th

Below is a roundup of last week’s notable industry news, with summaries and our opinions. Macy’s made a deal with the devil…

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Top Story 👁️

Advertisers Will Soon Be Able to Buy Macy's Media Network Through Amazon🔒 
Source: Adweek
August 21st, 2025

Summary: Macy's just became the first major retailer to partner with Amazon's Retail Ad Service, allowing Amazon to power sponsored product ads on Macy's website. This partnership is significant because retailers typically view Amazon as their biggest competitor, but Macy's is prioritizing advertiser convenience over competitive concerns.

The integration lets brands purchase sponsored product ads on Macy's website through familiar platforms like Amazon Ads and retail specialists like Pacvue, eliminating the need to work directly with Macy's sales team or use another proprietary retail tech stack. Macy's VP of retail media Michael Krans positioned this as "complementary" to their existing Criteo partnership—essentially keeping all options open to maximize demand.

Amazon launched its Retail Ad Service in January with smaller beta partners (Oriental Trading, iHerb, and Weee!), but landing Macy's validates the model and could accelerate adoption. The partnership uses AWS clean rooms for measurement to protect customer data—Macy's won't share personally identifiable information with Amazon.

This intensifies competition in retail media ad tech, where incumbents like Criteo already face pressure from newer players like Koddi, Mirakl, and Topsort. Now Amazon enters as the 800-pound gorilla.

Opinion: Macy's is hurting as a company (because of Amazon) and desperately needs revenue, so they're making a deal with ... Amazon. Rather than building advertiser relationships and partnering with neutral tech providers, they're hitting the easy button—turning on Amazon's spigot of ad demand. It's the classic, short-term revenue bump move over the strategic, long-term approach. Not great, but we get it—they're in a tough spot.

Meanwhile, Amazon is playing 3D chess. They've moved well beyond building their own retail media network—they're becoming the utility company for the entire retail industry. 

If this model scales, Amazon goes from competitor to kingmaker. They will collect tolls on every retail advertising dollar while gaining visibility into their competitors’ performance, pricing strategies, and customer behavior. It reminds us a bit of the Google AdSense playbook: become the biggest publisher, become the best publisher at ad monetization, then rent out your publisher ad monetization machine to all your publisher competitors. Except Amazon is doing it for retail. 

For marketers, consolidated buying across retail networks sounds wonderful! But be careful what you wish for: If Amazon becomes the monopolistic infrastructure layer for all retail media, what happens to pricing and innovation?

This is a big blow for the pure-play retail media companies like Criteo, Kevel, and Koddi. They don’t have as much demand as Amazon, so it’ll be hard to compete. The only thing they’ll have is neutrality (and maybe superior tech, for now). But that didn’t matter enough to Macy’s. Soon it may not matter enough to other retailers either.

Macy's made a deal with the devil. Maybe they had no choice. Other retailers may keep at it by continuing to build their retail media businesses independent of Amazon. But many retailers are in the same boat as Macy’s; Margins are thin, the economy is rocky, and Amazon continues to suck away market share. They need the short-term revenue bump to stay afloat. But they’ll only get it from their biggest competitor: Amazon. Retailers are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Either way, Amazon wins.

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That’s It For This Week 👋

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