IAB Australia today published the full recording of its Innovation in Commerce & Retail Media panel from the Sydney summit held on July 7, 2026, in which executives from Amazon, Criteo, Uber and Vudoo described a category moving away from the digital shelf and toward conversational agents, in-ride vouchers and shoppable editorial.

The session ran for roughly 35 minutes and closed the afternoon programme at the NSW Teachers Federation Conference Centre in Surry Hills. Lachlan Brahe, commercial director at Epsilon and chair of the IAB Retail Media Council, moderated. He was joined by Kasey Jamison, head of endemic advertising ANZ at Amazon; Keaton Garnett, senior solutions architect at Criteo; Andrea Hill, SVP retail practice at Vudoo; and Matt McGinley, head of CPG and retail ads at Uber.

Brahe opened by framing the shift in terms that had little to do with inventory. The category, he said, has moved "really quickly from being this high growth advertising channel to becoming, I guess, one of the organizing ideas in what it is to be a modern commerce business or a modern retailer." Sponsored products and search remain the foundation, he added, but the innovation is happening around off-site activation, connected television, in-store experiences, shoppable content and automation.

Amazon reframes the ad unit as the store

Jamison delivered the panel's most quotable line and its most contestable claim. Asked where Amazon looks for innovation beyond sponsored products, she argued the objective is no longer traffic routing at all.

"Innovation to us is about making every interaction, touch point, every connection between a brand and customer," she said. "It's about making that shoppable."

The supporting data point came from Amazon's own consumer research rather than a third party. According to Jamison, 75% of customers surveyed think about shopping multiple times a week, which she used to argue that a discrete shopping occasion no longer exists as a planning construct. The figure was presented without a published methodology, sample size or fieldwork date, and Amazon has not released the underlying study.

Her structural point followed from it: "I think the lines between entertainment and shopping, I think they don't exist anymore. I think they're completely blurred." She cited Prime Video advertising, where an interactive unit carries an add-to-cart button operable by remote control, and Twitch product overlays. That capability is not new. Amazon introduced interactive and shoppable formats for Prime Video, including pause ads and remote-activated shopping, in May 2024, and extended personalisation into those units through Dynamic TV Creative on May 11, 2026. In June 2026 the same interactive technology reached Samsung TV Plus inventory outside Amazon-owned properties.

Jamison summarised the position bluntly: "our innovation is the ad is the new storefront."

She also proposed a measurement change that cuts against how most retail media contracts are written. "We should stop counting clicks and instead let's count how many actions it takes a customer to go from discovery to purchase, and then we should obsess over pairing that down," she said. Fewer steps, on her argument, produce higher measurable lift. No supporting figures were offered for that relationship during the session.

The event took place on Prime Day, which Jamison noted from the stage.

The most concrete claim of the afternoon concerned navigation behaviour on Amazon's own storefront. According to Jamison, consumers in the United States are now using the conversational chat agent more than they use the search bar, because it has become part of their routine.

She described the interaction pattern in the terms Amazon uses in its own marketing: a shopper asks for a birthday present for a nine-year-old with a stated budget, or for the ingredients for a specific dinner, and the assistant performs the browsing, discovery and review reading on the shopper's behalf.

That claim lands against a documented adoption curve. Amazon disclosed in February 2026 that Rufus generated close to $12 billion in incremental annualised sales during 2025, with more than 300 million customers using the assistant across the year, monthly active users up 149% and interactions up 210%. On May 13, 2026, Amazon retired the Rufus brand and merged it with Alexa+ into a single assistant called Alexa for Shopping, available on the Shopping app, the website and Echo Show devices. Research covered by PPC Land in April 2026 found the assistant compresses a results page of roughly 50 products into approximately five named recommendations per response.

For brands, the arithmetic of that compression is the point. A narrowed consideration set makes inclusion materially more valuable and exclusion materially more costly, and it does so through a surface where the bidding mechanics are less visible than they are in keyword auctions.

Criteo puts commerce intelligence ahead of reach

Garnett pushed back gently on the framing that sponsored products are a solved, low-innovation format. They sit close to purchase intent, he said, and function less as advertising than as a search-and-response utility.

His argument was that the durable asset underneath both sponsored products and display is what Criteo calls commerce intelligence: product data, shopper behaviour, stock quantity, price and sales outcomes. "That commerce intelligence is the real value driver for retailers," he said. "It's how you apply that on non-owned assets that is where the magic happens."

When a retailer activates on AI discovery surfaces, CTV or third-party publishers, Garnett said, the exercise is not a reach play. The test is whether the commerce signal returns to the retailer's ecosystem and closes the loop for the brand.

That description tracks the infrastructure Criteo has been assembling. The company launched an Agentic Commerce Recommendation Service on February 5, 2026, reporting up to 60% improvement in recommendation relevancy in internal January 2026 testing against approaches relying on product descriptions alone. It became the first advertising technology partner in OpenAI's ChatGPT ad pilot on March 2, 2026, and by May had disclosed a Model Context Protocol implementation exposing commerce data resources, campaign workflows and executable tools to AI agents.

Garnett named one deployment directly. Criteo launched a chat conversation agent with Albertsons in the United States, he said, and the retailer has since recorded an increase in basket size with a sales agent running on its site. No percentage, time period or baseline was attached to that figure during the panel.

His caveat was the operational one. That outcome depends on feed quality. A base large language model can be stood up in Vertex, he said, but it needs commerce intelligence to hold product-level awareness. Retailers should be extending feed attributes beyond the standard set to include warranty periods, manufacturer of origin, materials and dimensions, because those are the attributes an assistant can weave into a conversation.

Uber treats the ride as a commerce surface

McGinley described Uber's advantage as a data position on real-world utility behaviour rather than a media position. Roughly 10 million Australians use the platform each month, he said, and the company reads innovation as tracking a change in what a delivery purchase actually delivers.

Quick commerce, on his account, has moved past speed as its selling point. "It's less and less about the actual purchase itself. It's more about the decision relief off the back of that purchase," he said, describing a younger user base for whom the recovered time matters more than the transaction.

Uber launched Creative Studio during 2026 to let brands appear in those moments through formats that are not additional tiles in a retail app: product sampling in the back of a car, and activations timed to drop-off. The campaign example he gave involved BWS. Uber identified spikes in alcohol purchase intent occurring off-platform as riders travelled to bars, restaurants and social occasions, served a journey ad in the vehicle, and linked that exposure to an in-store voucher. According to McGinley, the campaign produced a significant result on same-day in-store redemptions. No redemption rate was disclosed.

That sits within a product sequence PPC Land has tracked through 2026. Uber debuted Journey Takeover with Coca-Cola on January 6, 2026, opened Ads APIs to developers, POS providers and aggregators on June 2, 2026, and on June 15, 2026 added ride offers, Uber Eats brand takeovers and offsite ads under a unified platform merging rides and delivery.

On partnerships, McGinley cited work with Coles that extends into retail media, allowing brands to appear on the Coles storefront and homepage inside Uber's environment. He attributed the characterisation of that as an incremental shopper opportunity to Coles rather than to Uber.

The detail that drew laughter was a category expansion. Uber Eats has begun selling lawnmowers through Bunnings, delivered in under 30 minutes. McGinley used it to make a point about assortment: the platform's shopping mindset now extends to considered purchases that no quick-commerce roadmap of five years ago anticipated.

He also confirmed the company is testing agentic cart building in the United States, including uploading a shopping list image and automatically populating a cart with previously purchased favourites.

Shoppable content and the argument against last-click

Hill described Vudoo as a creative layer that makes advertising shoppable across the open web and social, with the resulting data owned by the retailer. "We don't disintermediate the brand, the retailer and the consumer," she said.

Her position on innovation was narrower than the panel's general enthusiasm. It is not about new formats or new placements, she said, but about appearing in the same places differently. "Every touch point that a brand actually has now needs to be shoppable," Hill said, so that consumers can signal intent where they already are.

She was direct about what she considers the constraint. "Consumers don't shop in funnels and they don't shop in channels," she said, before turning to measurement: "Can we get rid of last click attribution? I hate it."

That objection is not idiosyncratic. Attribution has been the recurring unresolved item at this event. At the 2025 edition of the summit, panellists from Coles 360, Circana and Google identified omnichannel attribution complexity as the category's central technical and philosophical problem, and PPC Land reporting in June 2026 documented how siloed attribution understates retail media contribution across channels.

On editorial environments, Hill argued for contextual fit as the precondition. A shoppable lawnmower advertisement on Vogue makes little sense, she said; a shoppable lip liner does.

Standardisation as the invisible layer

Asked whether the industry actually wants standardisation or interoperability, Garnett chose to defend the unglamorous option. "Standardization is this invisible layer that it's the boring part of retail media and advertising in general that just makes everything tick," he said.

His worked example was product identification. GTINs are widely adopted in Australian retail media, he noted, but a brand attempting the same identifier in a Korean retail media network returns nothing, because adoption there has not followed. He also disclosed that Criteo has added new reporting dimensions to meet Media Rating Council accreditation requirements covering advertisements that did not render.

Interoperability, in his framing, is compatible with differentiation. "Interoperability doesn't mean interchangeability," he said. A retailer can remain unique while allowing third-party stacks such as Pacvue and Skai to activate against its platform alongside Criteo's own demand side, provided it retains the levers, controls and guardrails that protect the value of the network.

He was less optimistic about a shared Australian reporting layer. Japanese retailers are assembling a network of that kind, he said, but Australia is a market of duopolies, and cooperation would require the sort of convening that has not yet occurred.

The gap is measurable. IAB Australia's Wave 3 State of the Nation research, released July 29, 2025, found 79% of existing retail media advertisers planned to increase spending, while agency satisfaction with retail media networks fell from 66% to 44% over the same period. Australian retail media spending was benchmarked to grow from $650 million in 2025 to $3 billion by 2027, roughly three times the United States growth rate. IAB Australia published national measurement principles in August 2024; adoption remains uneven.

What the panel expects by 2030

Brahe closed with a one-sentence round on the innovation most underdone today.

Jamison chose predictive commerce, arguing that AI systems will anticipate needs and that agents will transact on shoppers' behalf, leaving marketers to work out what that means for retail media economics. Garnett chose skeuomorphism, predicting that the grid of search results gives way to browsable, human-shaped environments assembled around a stated occasion, with monetised and organic SKUs held to the same relevance standard. McGinley offered standardised measurement, then substituted connected commerce, arguing that travel, transportation, tourism and hospitality remain unconnected at both the data and experience layers.

Why it matters for the marketing community

Three claims from this panel carry direct operational weight, and each arrives without published evidence.

The first is Amazon's assertion that its conversational agent has overtaken its own search bar in the United States. If accurate, the primary discovery mechanism on the largest retail media network in the world has changed, and the mechanics of visibility inside a five-item conversational response are not documented in the way keyword auctions are.

The second is Criteo's Albertsons basket-size result, offered without magnitude. Criteo's commercial position has been under pressure: the company reported retail media client losses weighing on Q1 2026 results, and in July 2026 became the subject of a reported private equity approach at a 50% premium, developments that postdate the panel and that make the durability of its agentic roadmap a live question for the roughly 225 retail media networks running on its infrastructure.

The third is the feed argument. Garnett's contention that assistants gravitate toward products carrying warranty, origin, materials and dimension data converts catalogue hygiene from a merchandising chore into a media variable. That claim is testable by any retailer with a feed and a conversational surface, and it is cheaper to test than most retail media pilots.

Meanwhile, the measurement question that Hill raised has now gone unresolved across at least two consecutive editions of this summit. Australian buyers have signalled the appetite: 54% of digital video advertising buyers are regularly using or testing CTV commerce integrations, and an equal share are using retailer first-party shopper data to target video. What they lack is a comparable way to read the result.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Kasey Jamison, head of endemic advertising ANZ at Amazon; Keaton Garnett, senior solutions architect at Criteo; Andrea Hill, SVP retail practice at Vudoo; and Matt McGinley, head of CPG and retail ads at Uber, moderated by Lachlan Brahe, commercial director at Epsilon and chair of the IAB Retail Media Council.

What: A panel on innovation in commerce and retail media in which Amazon claimed its conversational chat agent now exceeds search bar usage in the United States and that 75% of surveyed customers think about shopping multiple times a week; Criteo reported a basket-size increase at Albertsons from a chat agent and pressed for feed attribute depth and interoperability; Uber described in-ride advertising linked to in-store vouchers with BWS, a Coles retail media tie-up and 30-minute Bunnings lawnmower delivery; and Vudoo argued every brand touch point must be shoppable while calling for the end of last-click attribution.

When: The panel took place on July 7, 2026, during the IAB Australia Commerce & Retail Media Summit. IAB Australia published the full recording on July 28, 2026.

Where: NSW Teachers Federation Conference Centre, Surry Hills, Sydney, with claims spanning Australian, United States, Japanese and Korean markets.

Why: Retail media in Australia is projected to reach $3 billion by 2027 while agency satisfaction with networks has fallen and attribution remains unstandardised. The panel indicates where the category's next growth is expected to come from, and which claims currently rest on undisclosed vendor data.