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Welcome to The Brief by Kuro House, your daily dose of marketing intelligence to keep you sharp and ahead of the curve. Today, we’re diving into five stories that reveal how the biggest players in retail, media, and tech are adapting to shifting consumer behaviors, AI disruption, and the evolving creator economy. Let’s get right into it.
First up, let’s talk turkey—literally. According to Modern Retail, Walmart, Target, and Kroger are shaking up their Thanksgiving meal deals by swapping out name brands for private labels. This year, Walmart’s Thanksgiving basket is being promoted as 25% cheaper than last year’s, with turkeys at their lowest price since 2019. But here’s the catch: the savings aren’t just due to falling prices or political factors. Instead, Walmart has replaced several national brands with its own private-label alternatives, like switching out Marie Callender’s pecan pie and Ocean Spray cranberry sauce for store-brand versions. The 2025 basket serves 10 people for less than $4 each, compared to last year’s $7 per person for eight people. Target and Kroger are following suit, with Target’s $20 meal swapping out Del Monte and Campbell’s products for its Good & Gather and Favorite Day brands, and Kroger replacing Campbell’s soup with its own label. Why the shift? Retailers are responding to consumers who are more open than ever to private-label products, especially when 65% say they’re comfortable serving store brands at Thanksgiving. For retailers, this is a huge opportunity to showcase their private labels, protect margins, and build long-term loyalty while helping families stretch their budgets during uncertain economic times.
Next, Forbes is making a bold move in the post-search era by launching a dynamic, AI-powered paywall, as reported by Digiday. With search referral traffic down 40% this year, Forbes is pivoting to make subscriptions a bigger part of its business. The new paywall, rolled out to all users on November 14, uses AI to analyze reader behavior and tailor subscription offers in real time—so if you’re a repeat reader of small-business tax stories, you might get a personalized discount after your second article, rather than hitting a hard paywall immediately. Early results are impressive: mobile conversions are up 400%, desktop conversions by 174%, and the lifetime value of subscribers has soared—325% on mobile and 119% on desktop. Forbes is also focusing on multi-format sponsorships and creator-led IP, moving beyond its traditional ad model as open-web traffic becomes less reliable. Interestingly, Forbes is also grappling with protecting its brand and data from being ingested by AI models, but rather than just licensing data, it’s focused on building new products and extending its IP into new formats and revenue streams. This is a real-time test of how legacy publishers can adapt to the AI-driven, post-search media landscape.
Meanwhile, Google is retooling its pitch to advertisers as the search landscape shifts, according to another Digiday report. With more shoppers starting their product searches on AI-powered chatbots like Gemini and ChatGPT, Google is urging advertisers to invest more in upper-funnel channels like YouTube, display, and discovery ads. For the past six months, Google has been actively recommending these channels to agencies, emphasizing AI-powered campaigns like Demand Gen to help capture evolving search behaviors. Google is also introducing new attribution methods to make its ad products look more competitive against Meta, and is integrating ads into platforms like Google Maps and YouTube Shorts. While some agencies report promising improvements in video and image ad performance, others remain cautious about discovery display placements. The big picture? Google is hedging its bets, preparing for a future where search isn’t the only entry point for shoppers—and where AI chatbots might become the new gatekeepers.
On the programmatic advertising front, Digiday’s “Future of Marketing Briefing” highlights a major shift: the rise of agentic AI standards. Three new protocols—the Ad Context Protocol, User Context Protocol, and the Agentic RTB Framework—have emerged in just the past month, signaling a coordinated industry effort to prepare for autonomous AI agents in programmatic advertising. These standards are designed to provide a shared language and privacy-safe signals for agents to discover audiences, orchestrate buys, and operate directly within real-time bidding systems. The goal is to avoid repeating past mistakes, like opaque supply and weak governance, as automation becomes more autonomous. The rollout will be gradual, with publishers and platforms able to test agent workflows without overhauling their systems overnight. If successful, this could be the open web’s biggest reinvention since programmatic began, offering faster, more transparent, and more efficient auctions. But it all depends on industry cooperation and the ability to adapt without splintering standards or losing control to dominant platforms.
Finally, let’s look at how Beehiiv is evolving to meet the needs of modern creators, as detailed by Digiday. Originally a newsletter platform, Beehiiv is now positioning itself as an all-in-one operating system for creator-led businesses. Its latest updates let creators build full websites, sell digital products, integrate podcasts and YouTube feeds, and access improved analytics—all without needing third-party tools like Shopify or Kajabi. Creators like Ryan Broderick and the founders of Unicorner have welcomed the changes, noting that the newsletter space is getting crowded and that creators need more robust business tools to stand out. Beehiiv’s new website builder, powered by an AI tool acquired last year, allows for easy customization, while advanced analytics help creators understand their audiences and optimize content. Importantly, Beehiiv doesn’t take a cut of digital product sales, only charging a flat subscription fee—making it an attractive alternative to competitors like Substack, which often take a percentage. Beehiiv is also revamping its ad platform, offering creators more control and better monetization opportunities. As the creator economy matures, platforms like Beehiiv are betting that creators want to consolidate their tech stack, streamline operations, and keep more of their hard-earned revenue.
That’s it for today’s Brief. Whether it’s retailers reimagining value, publishers reinventing paywalls, tech giants future-proofing their ad businesses, or platforms arming creators for the next wave, one thing is clear: adaptability is the new currency in marketing. Thanks for tuning in, and remember—staying sharp means staying curious. Catch you tomorrow.
