🛒 Google Retail Agent

It’s been a little while—after a break over the holidays, I’m back with the first edition of the year, rounding up all the most significant digital marketing updates you might have missed.

Today’s Insights

• Google AI agents to retailers

• IG overtakes FB

• X is launching payments this year

• Disney offers 157M+ audience to advertisers

• Amazon is expanding sponsored ads

Feature

Google's wants to influence, not just how customers find products, but how they shop for them too.

Enter Google Agentspace, a platform Google claims is “one of the most transformative tools for retailers.”

Agentspace integrates with enterprise data sources, including unstructured data (like documents and emails) and structured data (such as spreadsheets).

With Agentspace as a foundation, Google is encouraging retailers to deploy AI agents that can:

• Guide shoppers through the buying process,

• Offer tailored product recommendations,

• Answer customer questions in real-time.

With Agentspace, Google is exploring a shift from being ecommerce traffic facilitators to becoming outcome enablers, providing retailers with tools to enhance the shopping experience through AI integration.

Read more: Google

Google & Meta

🤖 Google Ads VP outlines plans for 2025

Brendon Kraham said that shifts in consumer behavior mean “moving beyond simple keywords and embracing a multimodal search landscape where visuals, context, and even our surroundings play a crucial role in how we find what we need”.

Specficially, Google will double-down on Performance Max, Demand Gen, and Search campaigns — powered by Google AI.

Media Post

🚀 Meta launches bid to attract U.S. creators from TikTok

Accepted creators can earn up to $5,000 in extra bonuses over three months if they have an “existing presence on a third party social app”.

Meta

📈 Instagram will overtake Facebook as the largest U.S. social ad platform by the end fo the year

eMarketer predicts Instagram’s ad revenue to grow 15.9% YoY, reaching $37.13 billion. Reels and video-first content will drive Instagram’s ad growth, accounting for over 25% of ad spend by 2025.

eMarketer

More Headlines

📺 Disney reports 157M global streaming users on its ad-supported platforms

The figure includes 112 million domestic users across Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+. The data is based on users who streamed ad-supported content for over 10 seconds and averages 2.6 viewers per subscription.

CNBC

📢 Amazon will let retailers run sponsored ads on their own stores

The ‘Amazon Retail Ad Service’, allows companies to show “contextually relevant ads in the right place and at the right time” in search results, product pages and other areas of their site, Amazon said. The service could provide Amazon with valuable data it can use to bolster its ad prediction and recommendation technology.

CNBC

🤖 Amazon plans to relaunch Alexa with advanced generative AI features

Amazon AGI Chief, Rohit Prasad, says the company aims to replace the current system with AI models that can handle complex tasks.

Financial Times

🚀 Perplexity releases real-time search API

Perplexity AI's Sonar API gives companies the chance to develop their own generative search capabilities by leveraging real-time web data. This allows businesses to integrate AI search functionalities into their applications, providing users with up-to-date information.

Perplexity

🚀 NVIDIA is helping retailers develop digital shopping assistants

NVIDIA’s is enabling developers to create AI-powered assistants capable of understanding text and image prompts, handling multiple requests simultaneously, and providing personalized product recommendations.

NVIDIA

💳 X plans to launch its digital payments platform ‘X Money’ in 2025

X CEO, Linda Yaccarino, confirmed plans to debut X Money during a speech at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). The platform will offer P2P transfers and fund storage.

eMarketer

🛍️ Microsoft launches ‘Curate for Commerce’ for retailers to monetize first-party data

Curate for Commerce lets retailers use first-party data to provide targeted ads from relevant but non-competing brands across the web. Microsoft also launched ‘Sponsored Promotions by Brands’ to connect advertisers with shoppers across Microsoft Edge, Bing, and retail sites.

Microsoft

🛠️ Reddit launches Pro Trends tool for brands to track real-time conversations

Reddit Pro Trends lets businesses monitor live discussions around specific keywords, phrases, or topics. It provides data on conversation volume, identifies trends, and highlights communities discussing key topics.

Reddit also has also added ‘AMA Ads’ to host Q&A sessions.

Reddit

📹 Bluesky launches custom video feeds admist TikTok uncertainty

Users can now choose from different themed video feeds within the app. According to Tech Crunch, Bluesky’s bump from the X exodus slowed from 189% in November to 10% in December.

Bluesky

Thanks for reading

That’s all for today. Check out our website for real-time updates throughout the week.

Kole