On Sephora, worth noting this is the second AI storefront they've opened this year, after the ChatGPT app in March. Beauty keeps being the test bed for agentic checkout for structural reasons: tight catalogs, rich attributes, high margins, and shoppers already used to asking for recommendations.
The Gemini-written ads angle is the one that's landing hardest with the retailers we work with — once brands understand that their product feed is now the creative brief for their paid media, the conversation about feed quality stops being a technical conversation and starts being a brand conversation. The hardest internal battle isn't getting the Merchant Center configuration right; it's convincing a brand's creative team that Gemini is going to rewrite the product copy they spent months refining, and that the best defense is better structured attributes, not more approval rounds. For categories with high attribute complexity — furniture, apparel, industrial B2B — the gap between brands that have invested in feed engineering and those running default connectors is becoming visible in paid performance in ways that weren't there 18 months ago.
Very nice summary and agree. I’m going to find it very interesting for the paid leads that work brand side. When i was in-house the paid team could spend all day in their accounts + feed without engaging with the dynamics of the business, the website and the copy. Now, with this new direction Google has set the paid-leads are going to have to develop a new skillset that more aligns with how SEOs operated ie stakeholder management, pushing initiatives through the dev queue and most importantly as you say - engaging and collaborating with the brand teams
On Sephora, worth noting this is the second AI storefront they've opened this year, after the ChatGPT app in March. Beauty keeps being the test bed for agentic checkout for structural reasons: tight catalogs, rich attributes, high margins, and shoppers already used to asking for recommendations.
The Gemini-written ads angle is the one that's landing hardest with the retailers we work with — once brands understand that their product feed is now the creative brief for their paid media, the conversation about feed quality stops being a technical conversation and starts being a brand conversation. The hardest internal battle isn't getting the Merchant Center configuration right; it's convincing a brand's creative team that Gemini is going to rewrite the product copy they spent months refining, and that the best defense is better structured attributes, not more approval rounds. For categories with high attribute complexity — furniture, apparel, industrial B2B — the gap between brands that have invested in feed engineering and those running default connectors is becoming visible in paid performance in ways that weren't there 18 months ago.
Very nice summary and agree. I’m going to find it very interesting for the paid leads that work brand side. When i was in-house the paid team could spend all day in their accounts + feed without engaging with the dynamics of the business, the website and the copy. Now, with this new direction Google has set the paid-leads are going to have to develop a new skillset that more aligns with how SEOs operated ie stakeholder management, pushing initiatives through the dev queue and most importantly as you say - engaging and collaborating with the brand teams