The Home Depot’s supply chain has come a long way since 2017. Eight years ago, the home improvement retailer outlined a vision for a two-day parcel delivery network focused on placing inventory close to the end customer, Jordan Broggi, executive vice president of customer experience and president of online, said at an investor and analyst conference in early December. But Home Depot has managed to sail past two-day shipping speeds since then — 55% of its deliveries for in-stock SKUs today are made either the same day or the next day, more than triple its 2022 amount, per a company presentation. Powering Home Depot’s acceleration are nearly 200 facilities the retailer has added over the past eight years to fill various roles in its supply chain, according to Broggi.

Come next year things are going to go from bad to worse. Senior marketers know it and are already making contingency plans. Read: rationalizing ad dollars. Less than a third (29%) of the world’s largest advertisers plan to slash ad dollars next year, according to a study of 43 multinational companies from the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) and Ebiquity. Three quarters of the sample “agree strongly” or “agree” that 2023 budgets are under heavy scrutiny. Marketers are already being required to justify their investments. For many of them, 2023 will feel a lot like a recession. It’s not all doom and gloom. Some of those marketers surveyed (28%) claim they will invest more next year, per the study.

The Institute for Advertising Ethics (IAE), which in February announced it was expanding its curriculum and certification program to include so-called "greenwashing" prevention, this morning unveiled a new "Greenwash Prevention Toolkit" to help individuals and companies in the ad industry avoid the practice. The toolkit includes a new "Environmental Advertising Integrity Checklist," a guide on "Prevention Mechanisms," and a template for planning strategies over windows ranging from 30-days to one year.