Best Buy recently launched an in-house media company, joining Amazon, Walmart, The Kroger Co., and others on the retail media network bandwagon. “The world’s coming toward programmatic, and everyone wants a piece of it,” said John Goulding, head of strategy for the US at programmatic partner MiQ. We see retail media networks as the third big wave of digital advertising.

The news: Big Tech workers are mobilizing to unionize, likely inspired by similar movements in media and retail, as well as by the outsized growth and expansion of technology juggernauts. Efforts to unionize in the US:. 16 Starbucks stores have voted to unionize, and 150 more are holding elections.

“During COVID, some brands have learned that their efforts to in-house media were not core to their business," said Scott Hagedorn, CEO for North America at Omnicom Media Group. "Some advertisers that had brought media in-house prior to the pandemic discovered, they lost the flexibility to move media around and react nimbly to the market. 

Media and retail companies—among them Netflix, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Amazon—paused or closed operations in Russia, but these moves won’t have a major impact on their bottom lines. Netflix, for example, lost 700,000 Russian subscribers, amounting to less than 1% of its 221.6 million worldwide paid subscriptions.

This report explores the impact the pandemic has had on our latest regional estimates and trends for total media, traditional media, digital, and mobile ad spending in six markets in Latin America: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru.

On this episode of Brand Anatomy, where we get exclusive looks inside leading brands, eMarketer Briefing director Jeremy Goldman sits down with Abby Whitmer, vice president of ecommerce at BeautyBio, to discuss how the beauty brand is adjusting to iOS privacy changes, tackling supply chain issues as a medium-sized business, and lessons from this year’s holiday season.