The e-commerce giant’s CEO noted the dominance of brick-and-mortar retail despite decades of disruption, but sees that as a massive opportunity. “We’re not investing approximately $200 billion in capex in 2026 on a hunch,” Jassy wrote. Closer to retail, Jassy reiterated the company’s investments in rural America, saying “we understand that rural customers are often de-prioritized by logistics and telecom providers because remote communities are more expensive to serve.” “While other companies have been backing away from these customers, we’ve been running to them,” he said. “We’ve committed over $4 billion to expand our rural delivery network.” “Our retail business is now approaching $600 billion in topline, yet roughly 80% of global retail sales still happens in physical stores,” he said. “That will change.”

We all have our favorite marketing campaigns. Brilliant creative and flawless execution make them both memorable and compelling. Most of us can probably recite copy and tag lines from our favorites with little effort. Great campaigns stick with us long after they’ve run their course. But ultimately, the success of any marketing campaign is measured not by how memorable it is, but by how well it achieves its objective. Marketing campaigns can include a variety of elements: advertising, promotion, merchandising, public relations and social media. They can be splashy and costly or subtle and inexpensive. Big budgets don’t automatically guarantee success. Some of the most effective campaigns cost relatively little to produce and run. Marketing campaigns support a number of objectives. The most common types of campaigns include: click read more below

Last week I wrote an article about why Contribution Per Order (CPO) should be the critical revenue metric that businesses use rather than Return On Ad Spend (ROAS). As a reminder, while ROAS is an efficient measuring metric, it cannot assign health to a channel, making it a relatively useless tool. In contrast to ROAS, Contribution Per Order (CPO) brings in the magnitude of the campaign segment targeted. This metric subtracts the marketing cost and cost of goods from each order to determine how profitable each of those segments is contributing to top-line demand and bottom-line profits. In one of my side comments in this blog, I mentioned the need to analyze Paid Search programs utilizing the same metrics and by further separating into branded terms vs. non-branded terms. In a recent year-end seasonal review with one of my clients, Paid Search was only reporting at a macro level (combining branded and non-branded search), which can be misleading. As shown below, Paid Search has a relatively positive CPO compared to traditional print prospecting (+$1.16 vs. -$2.15). Without understanding the full impact, this client was considering marketing decisions to expand Paid Search, reduce print prospecting, and potentially eliminate print programs—leading to potentially devastating results.