Welcome back to another Taking Inventory.

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This week we take a look at how Meta launches products and the impact of payments as the new cookie

Plenty to hear about so let’s get on with it!

Listen to Episode 25 of the Taking Inventory podcast. This week we spoke with Jackie Pimentel, Meta's Sr. Global Marketing Director for Creators, Reels, and Threads. Jackie tells us about the lead up and launch of Threads, her take on why creator authenticity is the key to success, when platforms should start to monetize, and so much more. Bonus content includes James Borow and Jackie’s trip down Facebook Ads API memory lane.

Next week: We sit down with Jesse Pujji, founder & CEO GatewayX, to hear his founder story, how he’s building bootstrapped giants, and learnings from over a decade of founding, operating, and investing in companies and people.

Last week: We spoke with @AdTechGod, the anonymous account that’s taking ad tech and marketing by storm. We get into the origin of the account, its purpose, and its prophecies.

Subscribe and rate on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Welcome to the (Amazon) Jungle 🌴

For the last two weeks we explored how advertising businesses used to work and why Amazon’s playbook went viral. We close out the series this week by breaking down the impact that Amazon has had showing the entire industry the importance of payments as they avoided the problems that Apple created when they changed the rules of the game.

The implications are vast, but there are 5 main takeaways that we think are crucial for everyone to understand:

1. Payments are the new cookies. Despite a cookie-less future, what Amazon’s model has proven is that tracking isn’t going away with the cookie, instead payments will take their place in helping businesses monitor behavioral and transactional activity. And where cookies fall short, payments will help platforms build a holistic identity about all of us that will be more accurate to the individual, non-expiring, portable, and ultimately data that can be used across the entire advertising ecosystem.

2. The convergence of retailer and ad platform. There used to be two discrete roles for market players: Retailer (seller of goods) or Ad Platform (seller of attention). That’s no longer the case as retailers have rich, proprietary, customer data that they can use to serve targeted ads and ad platforms are using their large, highly engaged audiences to sell directly too. Both are creating new opportunities for themselves, and Amazon proved that being both retailer and ad platform has its strengths, especially in a post-Apple world.

3. Erosion of direct brand data: As brands make their products available across more touch points (i.e. Omnichannel) they stand to gain quite a lot (e.g. discovery, revenue, less platform risk), but they also stand to lose one of their most important assets: direct customer data. This was a strength of the early DTC brands, that they could sell directly, own their audience, and they knew exactly who was buying. With more platforms in the mix, however, each one is vying to own that data to bolster their ad business and the brand interactions have the potential to become less personal.

4. Rise of strategic partnerships: Companies working together isn’t just a ‘nice to have’ anymore, it’s a business imperative. Industry lines will continue to blur and these partnerships will allow for the merging of strengths across organizations, bring in innovative ways to engage customers and measure outcomes. We’re just seeing the beginnings of this with partnerships like Walmart + Roku, The Trade Desk + Attain, and Omnicom + Instacart, so we should expect many more names to continue coming together.

5. Managing a fragmented retail network: Brands need to be ready for a complicated future. The convergence of retailer and ad platform means that there are now more places where brands can and should sell. While this is a positive for reach and visibility, each platform has a different audience and aesthetic that will require unique product images, descriptions, and engagement tactics. Brands will also have to be ready to measure and understand sales data across channels.

It’s clear that the ads model is changing – and fast. Amazon may be winning today but in a world where payments are the new cookies there are going to be a lot of formidable players entering the fight for dollars.

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Wishing you all the best and have an amazing weekend.