Customer Data

Today’s marketers are integrating generative artificial intelligence solutions across workflows, automating key components of campaign creation and orchestration. And they're seeing results in record time. However, the next era of AI-enabled marketing strategies will not be centered on automation. Tomorrow’s marketing leaders will be focused on building agentic AI solutions that can handle complex workflows…

“We centralized our data. Where are the insights?” I hear this from marketing leaders every week. They thought bringing all of their data  together would make their decision-making easier. Instead, they got a clean dashboard. The data’s there, but it’s not telling them what to do next. So, they start shopping for answers elsewhere. Maybe…

Privacy regulation in the U.S. has moved out of policy and into production. As new state laws emerge in Indiana, Kentucky, and Rhode Island, businesses are navigating a growing patchwork of rules that now shape how digital commerce actually runs. For years, privacy compliance lived with legal and security teams. Today, it shows up in…

When considering fundamental shifts in how shoppers define value in today’s retail environment, at the center is continuity. It's the expectation that a shopper’s relationship with a brand doesn’t reset when they move between channels, but instead flows seamlessly across them. For retailers, this is where the challenge becomes operational. While digital channels have evolved…

When most people think about data companies, they think about Big Tech: companies like Meta and Google, which made their billions by acquiring and deploying user information. But the fact is, in 2026, virtually every sufficiently large business is a data company, no matter what its ostensible function is. And some of these data companies,…

In the brick-and-mortar retail landscape, businesses often operate with a significant blind spot: they don't truly know their customers. While digital loyalty programs can yield match rates of up to 30 percent, in-store rates tell a different story. In-person retail identification often lingers in the single digits, leaving the vast majority of in-store shoppers categorized…

Retailers are finally realizing that their customer data can pay for itself. For years, brands have treated first-party data as a cost of doing business, but now it's being redefined as a monetizable asset. Purchase history, browsing behavior, loyalty engagement, and customer preferences are becoming foundational inputs for personalization and performance measurement. Most organizations recognize…

As domestic markets mature and competition intensifies, retailers are increasingly looking beyond their home borders for growth. Cross-border e-commerce is no longer reserved for enterprise brands with unlimited budgets. It has become a viable and strategic expansion path for retailers of all sizes. In fact, global retail e-commerce sales are forecast to reach $6.8 trillion…

The retail media sector is expanding rapidly. In Europe, it’s growing at nearly four times the pace of the wider digital advertising market, according to figures from IAB Europe, and it’s forecast to hit €31 billion by 2028. For all its potential, retail media can also be complex and demanding, particularly for smaller advertisers with…

Many retailers assume that complying with the latest privacy laws or using trusted platforms is enough to stay protected, and that privacy lawsuits are mainly a risk for large national brands. Yet nearly half (43 percent) of recent web privacy claims have targeted businesses in the consumer discretionary sector, with retailers accounting for a significant…