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- [00:02]
A
Hello, it's February 17th, 2026. Welcome to this week's episode of the Commerce rift with the CPG guys. It's our weekly short segment, bite sized. 10 minutes of content, audio and video. We hope you enjoy our curated stories. I'm your co host, pbsb. I'm joined by Paparaj, the father of pop stars and CRO of Think Blue Consulting. Sree, how are you?
- [00:20]
B
Oh man, it was a crazy, crazy January. We were at so many industry events. Doesn't look like February is going to slow down because we're actually at Cagney. We're actually watching presentations from the world's largest CPG brand CEOs, CFOs, and we're actually going to interview and we're not going to say who, but we have a surprise podcast coming with senior leaders from here and then we go to E Tail Palm Springs, then SOCOM Live in Los Angeles. Shop talk over here before you blink. But Peter, today I want you to tell me what's going on with Flywheel and what do you what's something big you're focused on?
- [00:58]
A
Well, sri lots going on at Flywheel these days, onboarding a couple of new enterprise clients. I'm working on the Flywheel Client Advisory Board. There's so much to happen in the next couple of months at Flywheel. Our sister company Omni is kicking off. They introduced their capabilities, the combined universal ID through the IPG acquisition, notably Axiom. So lots going on. But I should also mention with respect to our trip to Cagney, one thing that we didn't mention we will is that we're actually going to, as you know, we do report on it and we typically do daily posts from on LinkedIn from this event, but we're actually going to be writing a column through retail media IQ's mass market retailer newsletter and website where we'll talk about everything we're seeing at Cagny. So Please watch our LinkedIn pages for links to all that content. And of course, at the end of the event we'll provide you with access to all of the presentations in a single download. So pretty great stuff going on. Sree. All right, I'll kick off the first story. Elon Musk's Grok is having a moment. The AI chatbot jumped from 1.6 to 15.2% market share among daily US users between January 2025 and 2026, according to Aptopia. That puts it third behind Chap, GPT and Gemini and ahead of Copilot, Perplexity, Deepseek and Claude my personal favorite. But here's where it gets messy. Grok's big surge came in early January 2026, right when word got out that it would generate explicit images of people, including miners. Downloads doubled from 500k to nearly a million daily and market share jumped from 12 to 15.2% in a month. User demographics tell the rest of the story. 82% of Grox weekly users are male over the past six months. Compare that to ChatGPT at 50%, Gemini at 45 and even Claude at 78. Gro built features specifically for this audience. Musk's leaned in posting Grok generated videos of women professing their love. This isn't just Grok. OpenAI is planning adult mode for ChatGPT in the coming months. When they retired the beloved GPT 4.0 model this week, users mourned online. One called it a criminal offense. OpenAI also fired a policy exec who opened Adult Mode last month. Well, they said, though they say that's not why the content matters. In all honesty, as these AI companies race to go public engagement in everything SpaceX just acquired Xai and could IPO as soon as June, potentially beating OpenAI to the public markets. The pressure to sustain growth is creating some rather uncomfortable product decisions.
- [03:59]
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Sri why am I not surprised whatsoever that this is the path that these tools would head down? So from Grok and Elon Musk we jumped to Roku, which saw platform revenue, a segment of the business that includes advertising, rise 18% year over year to a record $1.22 billion in Q4, according to an earnings statement they released. Platform revenue grew at the same rate for full year 2025 to a whopping $4.15 billion, driven by momentum in video advertising and streaming ad distribution. Roku claims its video advertising gains outpaced the broader over the top and digital ad markets in the US last year, citing Standard Media Index data. There's still a lot of ad dollars that is in the traditional linear ecosystem, Peter and I believe that too, but still moving to streaming, said Roku CEO Anthony Wood on a call discussing the results with investors. We're taking, I would say more than our fair share of those dollars. Roku, which acts as a media distributor and also operates its own streaming services including the ad supported Roku channel, is the number one streaming TV platform in the us, Canada and Mexico. Based on our stream for the Hypothesis Group findings cited in the release, Roku's ads has been supported by scaling its self service Ads manager, targeted at small and mid sized businesses Lolav, the haircare brand owned by Jennifer Aniston, recently used Roku ads manager for his first TV campaign and actually saw a whopping 40% lift in sales, according to Roku. I remember having this conversation on Roku going to its own self supported platform away From Managed Services three years ago on the CPG guys, SMBs were estimated to spend as much as $640 billion last year, per an Intuit report. Underpinning the size of the market opportunity, Roku pointed to generative AI tools and partnerships like the one with Spaceback, which converts social video into TV ads as accelerants for ad managers growth. Roku also worked to build out its ad tech relationships last year, including through a major deal with Amazon Ads that aims to provide the largest authenticated connected TV audience footprint in the US Asked about the Amazon pack, Roku executive said it's still early innings, but a key piece of a larger strategy to enhance marketing performance and improve industry operability through partnerships. Roku also works with Yahoo dsp, the trade Desk, Applovin World and Magnite on the advertising front, but specific to Amazon, the Amazon DSP grows and becomes and is successful, which we think it will be will be successful along with, said Roku CFO and COO Dan Jeddah. Over to you Peter for the next one shree.
- [06:36]
A
That story was very shocking to me. I had no idea that Jennifer Aniston had a hair care line. I think that if they're using Amazon Marketing cloud, they're about to get a new to brand customer. All right. Albertsons has joined a pilot program run by OpenAI to explore how conversational advertising formats presented through ChatGPT can drive better consumer experiences, the grocer announced on Thursday. Grocer is beginning its involvement in the test with ads linked to Valentine's Day. People who enter phrases such as best flowers for Valentine's Day might see ads for an Albertsons banner in their area. Albertsons participation in the pilot program follows other steps the company has taken to integrate agentic and generative AI tools into its operations. Albertsons said its retail media unit, Albertsons Media Collective of this podcast, would be looking to help brands reach shoppers through ChatGPT as the pilot program progresses. Quote we're focused on advertising that enhances the customer journey instead of interrupting it. By testing ads in ChatGPT, we're growing our engagement with new customers and continuing to connect with our current customers in meaningful ways, unquote, jennifer Sains, Albertson's chief commercial officer, said in a statement. In a description of the pilot on its website. OpenAI says advertisements do not influence the answers ChatGPT generates. Company added that it does not share people's conversations with advertisers and will always label ads as sponsored and visually separate them. Our goal is for ads to support broader access to more powerful ChatGPT features while maintaining the trust people place in ChatGPT for important and personal tasks, OpenAI said. OpenAI noted that the test is for adult users who log in to the ChatGPT system through its free and go subscription tiers, while its Plus Pro, Business, Enterprise and Education tiers will not have advertisements. Albertson's decision to step up Its partnership with OpenAI comes as the grocer's adoption of artificial intelligence technology to engage with shoppers sees early signs of success. Shoppers are showing strong interest in AI based tools the company has introduced driving double digigit basket growth, the company says. Albertson's AI based tools include an agentic AI shopping assistant on its websites that it announced last December. Early in 2025, the company launched an online search tool known as Ask AI that allows shoppers to ask questions about products sri. You know, it makes me think of the Claude advertisement during the super bowl where they said Claude never has and never will have advertisements in it. Over to you, we'll see.
- [09:18]
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Yeah, I don't believe any one of those things. Anyway, here's a big one. Kraft Heinz on Wednesday said it's pausing work on its previously announced plans to split the company. CEO Steve Cahelane, who joined Kraft Heinz in January, said in the statement that many of the company's issues are fixable and within our control. My number one priority is returning the business to profitable growth, which will require ensuring all resources are fully focused on the execution of our operating plan, he said. As a result, we believe it's prudent to pause work related to the separation and will no longer incur related dis synergies. This year, Kraft Heinz also plans to invest $600 million to fuel a turnaround of its U.S. businesses. The company plans to spend the money on its marketing, sales, research and development. The investment will go forward and towards product superiority and select pricing, according to Kahilim. The sign over time Speed of price pack architecture In September, the company announced plans to break up, reversing much of the blockbuster $46 billion merger from a decade ago that created one of the biggest food companies in the world. While investors originally cheered the merger, the lackluster performance of the joint company and its fading luster as the combined company's U.S. sales slipped, it wrote down many of its iconic brands like the famous Oscar Mayer and Maxwell House Coffee. For at least six years, Kraft Heinz has been in turnaround mode trying to revive its U.S. businesses. Warren Buffett, who helped mastermind the deal, said he was disappointed in the decision to split Berkshire Hathaway under the new CEO Greg Abel. For those of you don't know, Warren did step down late last year. CEO Greg Abel has since taken a formal step towards unwinding its 28% stake in Kraft Heinz. We support CEO Steve and the Kraft Heinz Board of Directors this ship under Steve's new leadership, he should pause work on the company's previously planned separation. As a result, management can commit to strengthening Kraft Heinz's ability to compete and serve customers, abel said in a statement. For years, Kraft Heinz has under invested in his brands. Executives appeared unwilling to change that strategy, Piper Sandler analyst Michael Lavery wrote in a note to clients on Wednesday. This appears to have changed with the hiring of Steve, who has reshaped their 2026 plans and proposed split and much more significantly than we had expected in just six weeks since he started as the CEO, lavery said. We still believe this remains a show me story and this is only the first step in getting KHC in a position for sustainable growth, which still looks unlikely to come anytime soon. But not everyone on Wall street was sold on the reversal Wednesday. Shares of Kraft Heinz fell as much as 5% in early trading before rebounding to trade essentially flat. We'll see what comes out of Cagny. We'll be eagerly looking forward to that one because I'm sure there'll be a lot of conversation on it. Take us home Peter Cherie, I think.
- [12:06]
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This just says to you and me, we gotta stick around with each other for another 560 episodes or so. What do you say? All right, as we wrap up a reminder to catch up with our recently released episodes, we have one featuring Justin Hahnemann from Amazon Web Services and of course our very own super bowl ad recap by yours truly and Paparaj AKA Sri. Watch out for our summary of Cagny presentations Tuesday through Friday of next week. You can find it on Mass Market retailer's website and they'll have it in their newsletter. Those will be released very shortly. All right folks, that's our take on relevant commerce happenings from so many announcements this past week we thought were meaningful and could not be passed off for a riff. We hope you enjoyed it. Please do click like our posts on all platforms. Follow us on LinkedIn Instagram TikTok, Facebook and now YouTube. We'll see you next week.
- [12:58]
C
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