Retail media has been a profit engine for retailers, especially onsite sponsored product ads with massive margins. But what happens when shopping shifts from browsing and searching to AI agents that “decide the SKU” before a shopper ever hits a retailer site? In this episode, Scot and Kiri map the collision course between retail media networks and agentic commerce, walk through emerging ad formats from Google, Amazon (Rufus), and LLMs, and dig into the hardest problem of all: monetizing AI attention without breaking trust.

What’s Covered:

Why agentic shopping compresses the journey, and shrinks onsite ad inventory
The “two threats” to onsite retail media
How offsite retail media depends on audience signals that may dry up as browsing declines
Why in-store media may be the most resilient channel
Google’s “Direct Offers,” the rise of an agentic storefront, and what it unlocks
The emerging idea of “Agentic PLAs” and retailers bidding at the SKU level (Buy Box vibes)
Kiri’s wishlist: multimodal ads (video/try-ons), offsite audience extension, and contextual targeting over “creepy” behavioral retargeting

Agentic commerce won’t kill advertising, but it will force it to evolve fast. The winners will be the platforms that can monetize attention without sacrificing trust, and the brands/retailers that learn to show up in these new surfaces early.

Timestamps

00:05:04 — Meet Kiri Masters + Retail Media Breakfast Club
00:08:01 — The three buckets: onsite, offsite, in-store retail media
00:10:01 — Why onsite is the money machine (and most vulnerable)
00:11:11 — Offsite retail media + closed-loop attribution
00:14:23 — In-store media: small today, resilient tomorrow
00:16:11 — Are retailers already seeing traffic shifts? Category matters
00:19:27 — ChatGPT ads: early signals and why it’s still rudimentary
00:21:22 — Scott’s framework: ad formats + Instant Checkout incentives
00:23:06 — Google’s “Direct Offers” and the agentic storefront idea
00:25:10 — Collaborative bidding: retailer + brand split the spend
00:28:11 — Google testing new units: “Agentic PLA” / paid retailer placement
00:33:14 — Trust vs monetization: don’t break the golden goose
00:34:04 — Amazon Rufus: sponsored prompts as a new surface
00:39:08 — Instacart’s ad playbook + trade dollars as inspiration
00:40:38 — Why it’s not a race to the bottom: service layers + loyalty
00:43:24 — The big hope: context-based targeting over creepy retargeting
k00:46:52 — If Kiri ran ChatGPT ads: offsite + multimodal + new formats
00:48:04 — Virtual try-ons + “throw away the sponsored product textbook”
00:50:00 — Closing + follow Retailgentic

👉 Connect with Kiri: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kiri-masters/
👉 Learn more about Retail Media Breakfast Club: https://www.retailmediabreakfastclub.com

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Kiri Master's Round 2: The Ad Wars Come to Agentic Commerce