Google Looking to Edge Back into Amazon's Territory - on TV and AI
Also, check out YouTube Day on June 11 in NYC!
YouTube Day 2026
On June 11, I’m co-hosting an event at YouTube’s headquarters in New York with my partners at Cadent. The focus is going to be on the new TV landscape and YouTube’s emerging role, the increasing power and prominence of creators, and of course, how artificial intelligence impacts it all. We’re planning to take the temperature of the TV upfront market, while previewing what to expect in Cannes.
If you’re interested in attending, please get in touch. It’s gonna be sick.
Shopping Redux
Is Google slowly trying to advance into Amazon’s territory?
Last week, at the company’s splashy Brandcast event in New York, somewhat overlooked amidst YouTube’s embrace of creator-led original shows was the announcement that Google is making it easier to buy things on YouTube with two easy remote clicks via Google Pay.
The move is the latest in a string of attempts to make connected TV shopping more accessible and habitual - an area where Amazon has been particularly aggressive.
There is still a long way to go before interactive TV shopping (through advertising) becomes a real thing, but for it to truly take off, it’s got to be seamless and pervasive. So for this to work, Google not only has to get people used to, and expecting to shop when watching YouTube, it’s got to get more folks using Google Pay (practically everyone shops via Amazon - and certainly Prime viewers do).
All of which is a tall order. In Google’s favor is the fact that many YouTube creators’ content lends itself to commerce quite well. The company says that viewers spend an average of over 110M hours daily watching shopping videos on YouTube.
Shoppable TV is one thing. Google’s broader shopping ambitions may have been telegraphed this week during the company’s Google Marketing Live event, where executives talked a lot about about how many people are looking for shopping help within Gemini -and how the product discovery process and consumer decision making may be fundamentally changing.
The underlying message seemed to be - AI may present an ecommerce do-over.
“More and more people are coming to these surfaces to shop, and they are going much deeper,” said Ashish Gupta, vice president and general manager of merchant shopping. “We want to remove friction, and close the entire loop.”
That sounds very Amazony. And it’s that closed loop power that makes Amazon and other retailers’ ad businesses so lucrative. To potentially capture some of that, Google is introducing not only a spate of new Gemini ad units, but a Universal Cart product designed to work across retailers and across services.
However, Google execs made it clear that at least for now, they are not trying to encroach on Amazon’s selling or logistics dominance. “We are seeing a massive shift in how people shop,” said Gupta. “We want to help merchants develop deeper relationships with their customers in these new AI experiences. We see ourselves as a matchmaker. We are not a retailer,, and not a marketplace.”
Indeed, Google appears to be saying, ‘hey, every other retailer that is not Amazon, or those that maybe aren’t wild about having to sell via Amazon, we can help you out, since AI is reshaping all the shopping rules.” If nothing else, this could get Google a crack at the Retail Media advertising windfall it has largely missed out on. Early partners include Nike, Sephora, Target, Ulta Beauty, Walmart, Wayfair and Shopify (I am somewhat surprised that any of these brands would want another party between them and their precious one-on-one customer relationships - yet that’s exactly the deal with Amazon today).
Of course, there remains the question - do we know that people will want to shop via AI assistant experiences? After all, look at how quickly ChatGPT shuttered Instant Checkout.
“It’s obviously very early days,” said Gupta. “We are seeing a lot of feedback that people are benefiting.”
Kids TV These Days
This week, on the Next in Media podcast, I chatted with Emma Witkowski, VP of Media Solutions at WildBrain - the company behind kids hits like Teletubbies and Strawberry Shortcake.
I asked her about the state of kids TV and kids marketing in an era where YouTube seems to dominate, appointment TV is over, and kids are consumed by platforms like Roblox and Fortnite.
WildBrain sees surprising potential in FAST services aimed at kids and families. “We noticed two shifts that were really happening,” Witkowski said. “First, audience fragmentation, but also subscription fatigue really settling in.”
“Families are gravitating towards free, ad-supported content because of the strain on their wallets. So FAST sits at the intersection of those two trends. So we made a very deliberate strategic move into it back in 2019…we had the ingredients to actually be really successful in this space: that’s about a really deep library of content, globally loved IP, and the programming expertise to be able to turn it into a real channel experience.”
Check out the full episode here: