ECOMMERCE: Wayfair’s direct retail revenue, which primarily comes from orders placed online at Wayfair.com, Joss & Main, AllModern, Birch Lane and Dwell Studio e-commerce sites, increased 52.7% to $832.4 million in Q3 ended Sept. 30 from $545.0 million in Q3 2015. Following its 2015 holiday strategy, Wayfair is featuring twice as many holiday-related products this year compared with last year, CEO and co-founder Niraj Shah told investors on the call, according to a Seeking Alpha Transcript.

ECOMMERCE: Meanwhile, investors had negative reactions to Amazon’s third quarter earnings. After the e-retail giant reported, Amazon’s stock fell 5.1%. “Amazon reported Q3 revenues above consensus expectations with strength across the board, but with lower operating/net income, as margin expansion will likely remain lumpy given the pace of investment across multiple growth areas in retail, technology and media,” Colin Sebastian, e-commerce stock analyst at Robert W. Baird & Co., wrote in a note to investors after the earnings report. 

ECOMMERCE: Given the extreme competition they face from established players, ecommerce startups are focusing on products as yet untapped by the existing market. The mere fact that worldwide consumers are willing to buy non-traditional products online is testimony to the growing faith they place in ecommerce. In the online marketplace, consumers are no longer shying away from clicking "buy" for items that in recent years many would have purchased only at a brick-and-mortar store.

BRAND: I am attempting to change the standard of procedure.  If you look deep into the apparel manufacturing process, one can easily conclude that we are still using the same machines and manufacturing process that we used for many years. I seek to change the manufacturing process. I have invested in a new company that makes a new kind of stitching. By changing the procedure, we can, therefore, change the style.  

ECOMMERCE: In it, Wenig acknowledged the “sense of fear and disruption caused by the impact that changing economic trends, including technology innovation, are having on people’s lives.” He then made the case for eBay as a tech platform that erases boundaries rather than builds them. Wenig highlighted that eBay was founded by an immigrant, the French-born entrepreneur Pierre Omidyar, in a not-so-veiled nod to the anti-immigrant push that galvanized Trump’s base.

ECOMMERCE: I’m hard pressed to find an ecommerce site that is not constantly scrambling to engage more and drive more sales. Technology is finally helping with those efforts in a big way. Artificial intelligence (AI), which has demonstrated its value in industries like marketing, healthcare and finance, is now making a splash in online commerce.

ECOMMERCE: The brick-and-mortar retail giant's online efforts have nothing if not room to grow: Wal-Mart increased its e-commerce sales just 0.4% in its most recent quarter, with online sales representing just 3.1% of its total revenue, according to eMarketer data supplied to Retail Dive. By comparison, arch-nemesis Amazon generated $32.7 billion in e-commerce sales during the third quarter, up 29% year over year. 

BRAND: Rachael Petitt, Marketing Director at Uber, was one of the speakers at the Festival of Marketing 2016 and she gave us plenty of background to UberGiving. In September 2016, the European refugee crisis was thrown into sharp relief by the death of three-year-old Alan Kurdi. It was around this time that Uber decided to provide logistics support. The app allowed people to swipe to 'Giving' and request a car to pick up donations such as blankets and clothing which would be delivered to local charity partners such as Save the Children in the UK.

MEDIA: Lastly, from 2012, this is quite simply the most senseless — and greatest — men’s underwear commercial ever made. Show me a better one, nonbeliever. Agencies: BETC and Rita, Paris. If we (I mean “you” creative director, CMO, brand manager, not you, digital “guru”) want to save the dying creativity in advertising, we need to stop worrying about what every overly sensitive, reactive schnook on the internet thinks about our ads and start — in the words of David Byrne — “stop making sense.”

TRADE: To be sure, American consumers, who generally love a deal, are not willing to give up low prices, as evidenced by the success of off-price retailers such as the TJX Companies, which generated nearly $31 billion in revenue in its 2015 fiscal year. In fact, the off-price segment in the US is expected to grow 6 to 8 percent from 2015 to 2020, while the overall apparel and home industry is expected to grow just 4 percent over the same period, according to a report by Moody’s.

DATA: However, while brands today are already well versed in the Millennial market influence, what has proven to be more difficult is quantifying how important the Millennial influence is to driving brand preference across industries. The key to future proofing a brand across generations will be two-fold. First, understand which Millennial Mindsets are most important to driving brand preference for individual categories and brands, and second, how well does a brand score on delivering against the key benefits sought after in each Millennial Mindset?  

MEDIA: Google is on track to generate close to $60 billion in advertising revenue this year. More than 80% of that will come from sales of advertisements that show up on Google Search. Most of the rest is generated by graphical and video ads, a big portion of which are sold by Google on behalf of non-Google websites, which are Mr. Spencer’s focus. Such ads are important revenue contributors to websites like BuzzFeed, The Economist, the New York Times and thousands of other top sites that use Google’s systems to sell or manage some of their ad space.