Future Commerce

By Phillip Jackson, Brian LangeSociety & Culture Business Entrepreneurship Philosophy Marketing

Future Commerce episodes

September 30Memorable Over Measurable: Retail’s Lost Wonders
Taste can’t be manufactured, so brands are hiring the people who have it. Writer and gr8 collab founder Emma Apple Chozick returns to talk with Phillip about her creative process (sans content calendar), building ShopMy’s Signals Substack on proprietary data, and what the long-gone BEST Products showrooms can teach us about designing retail spaces worth remembering.
A Category of OneKey takeaways:
Brands can’t manufacture taste; they’ve learned to partner with people whose judgment audiences already trust.
Real editorial starts with an insight, question, or tension. Consumers today can sniff out a product pitch from a mile away — if a brand’s editorial isn’t valuable as standalone content, it’s not worth sharing.
BEST Products’ SITE showrooms prove the best retail trades measurability for memory.
Emma Apple Chozick: “Taste is obviously completely subjective. But when a brand resonates with a particular person’s taste, that’s not replicable. A brand can’t create that on their own. They can try, but it’s never gonna feel authentic.”
Emma Apple Chozick: “I don’t know if the goal is actually ‘to grow.’ I think the goal is to work on really compelling projects that are aligned with what I’m interested in and can reach new people. But the goal isn’t always reach.”
Phillip: “I don’t know that any of those [hot new channels] actually reflect culture. I think we bend culture to those things because that’s where we put capital, and an industry likes to talk about them because they’re new. But the people actually define what the culture is around the brand.”
In-Show Mentions:
Watch Emma’s BEST Products video
Find Emma Apple Chozick on LinkedIn and Instagram
Learn more about gr8 collab
Explore the archive of SITE New York
Read Signals: A Publication by ShopMy
Watch Surroundings on YouTube
Read Emma’s Dwell essay, “The Midcentury House That Raised Me”
Listen to Emma’s first Future Commerce episode, Creating Credible Content and Community-Building Collabs
Associated Links:
Read: Member Brief: Return on Experience and the New KPIs of Store Design
Read: Insiders #188: Architecting Desire: How Retail-Hospitality Hybrids are Changing Consumption
Read: Substack and Retail’s New Media Era
Read The Senses: “That’s a Great Collab”
Listen: Where Culture Happens, Commerce Follows
VISIONS Summit at MoMA, New York City: Join us on November 3, 2026
Watch: Future Commerce on YouTube
Check out Future Commerce Plus for exclusive content and save on merch and print
Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce world
Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce
Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
37 min
September 23Rewind: Everything, Everywhere, All at Once
Welcome to Future Commerce Rewind, where we revisit our deepest and most enduring conversations. This week, we're playing back our April 2025 conversation with Andrew McLuhan, grandson of Marshall McLuhan and director of The McLuhan Institute. Andrew joins Phillip and Brian to explain why his grandfather's ideas still hold up: the side effects of a technology tend to become its main effects, and the Global Village was never as idyllic as it sounds. AI has become a companion, an advisor and a shopping assistant. McLuhan's asks the core question: what do our new tools extend, and what do they change about us?
Associated Links:
Get your ticket to VISIONS Summit: NYC
Check out Future Commerce on YouTube
Check out Future Commerce Plus for exclusive content and save on merch and print
Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce world
Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce
Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
1 hr 49 min
September 16Separating Real Signals from the Noise
The in-house research team has hollowed out, and the LLMs picking up the slack are only delivering their best guesses. Merciv, the agentic brain behind Future Commerce’s Signal Reports, has set out to deliver auditable, defensible, and unified reporting solutions — and it’s redefining what brands are capable of achieving in-house in the process.
Phillip and Alicia welcome Merciv co-founder and CEO Shaia Erlbaum to the show to talk about how brands can read signals in real time, and verify their relevancy. Shaia argues that data itself is commoditizing, but verification is not. The most honest consumer signal lives too deep for surveys to reach, which is why our Signal Reports are looking deeper than stated behaviors and are telling completely new kinds of retail and culture stories.
The Toothpaste Doesn't Lie Key takeaways:
Insights teams keep shrinking while the C-suite depends on them more than ever.
Surveys capture posturing. Forums, reviews, and comment sections capture behavior.
Data is commoditizing. Proprietary brand knowledge is the durable moat.
The first Signal Report, a collaboration between Future Commerce and Merciv, maps where GLP-1s removed cultural friction – and where friction migrated to.
"Almost everyone answering a survey question about how many times they brush their teeth in a day will say twice. But if you actually look at those sales figures, they simply don't sell enough toothpaste." — Shaia Erlbaum
"These models aren't built to tell you, 'Hey, I don't know.'" — Shaia Erlbaum
"There's a world where data's already becoming a commodity… a lot of the real advantage is less rooted in which model's more intelligent, but more so in to what degree can we actually verify the information we're coming across." — Shaia Erlbaum
"The office of the CMO is becoming more of an individual contributor role." — Phillip Jackson
In-Show Mentions:
Merciv: merciv.com
"Frictionless Wellness: GLP-1s and What Comes After the Age of Autonomy" – the first Future Commerce Signal Report, powered by Merciv.
LORE, our newest book on who really writes your brand's story. Get it in the Future Commerce shop.
Associated Links:
Read the first Signal Report, Frictionless Wellness: GLP-1s and What Comes After the Age of Autonomy
Insiders 204: The Ozempic Effect: How GLP-1s Rewrote the Gospel of Self-Love
Episode 435: Predictions 2026: Prepare for the Age of Autonomy
Episode 367: AI Agents Are Here. "Brands" Might Be In Danger.
Episode 447: The Agent Has Left the Building
Check out Future Commerce on YouTube
Check out Future Commerce Plus for exclusive content and save on merch and print
Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce world
Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce
Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
44 min
September 11Cartographies of Meaning
Nikita Walia and Elliot Vredenburg of U.N.N.A.M.E.D. Studios took to the VISIONS stage at MoMA last year to enlighten a room of retail executives and brand marketers about the realities of worldbuilding. Their theory: a brand’s final form is decided by the public—and the strategist's job is to navigate that story, not control it. And they use Mercator, Buckminster Fuller, Guy Debord, free public Wi-Fi, and an acne sticker to back up their claims.
Mapping Meaning Isn’t About Being RightKey takeaways:
Branding isn't worldbuilding because worldbuilding just imposes another set of rules
A three-hundred-page brand book is obsolete the day it ships, and rebrands every five to ten years are theater for stakeholders
The public decides a brand's final form, not the guidelines deck
Regenerative brands are always rebranding
[00:00:25] "Counter to what you've heard today, branding is not, in fact, worldbuilding." — Nikita Walia
[00:04:34] "This is sameness being sold to us as a form of consistency." — Nikita Walia
[00:15:45] "It's not about being right. It's about being useful, and useful in motion." — Elliot Vredenburg
[00:17:09] "A regenerative brand doesn't need to rebrand every five to ten years because it's always rebranding." — Elliot Vredenburg
In-Show Mentions:
The Mercator projection (1569) and Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Map
Superstudio, The Continuous Monument
Guy Debord and psychogeography
LinkNYC
Burberry, Daniel Lee, Demna's Balenciaga, Pierpaolo Piccioli
Starface
Associated Links:
Read Alicia Esposito's companion essay, The New Meaning of Brand Building: Cartographies of Meaning
Watch the original session at VISIONS Summit: Cartographies of Meaning
Hear Dami Lee's VISIONS session, The Stories Behind Our Spaces
Listen to Building Culturally Intelligent Brands with Dr. Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel
Revisit The Anti-Blands, Existential Brands, and the New Dadaism
Read Surface Culture: When Brands Mistake Wallpaper for Authenticity
Check out Future Commerce on YouTube
Check out Future Commerce Plus for exclusive content and save on merch and print
Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce world
Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce
Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
23 min
September 10 *TEASER* The Oreogate Lady Is NOT Real!
Can anyone tell the staged from the real anymore? On today’s After Dark: We’re growing increasingly certain that everything is fake now. Amazon drones delivering your package to the deep end of your backyard pool? Curiosity bait. A bunch of Kindergarten moms actually keeping up in a group thread? A Suno commercial. That behind-the-scenes footage? AI-generated – but you watched it, didn’t you? PLUS: The minds of Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim have converged to craft what’s anticipated to be one of the most compelling documentaries we’ve ever seen.
This episode is exclusive to Future Commerce Plus members. Subscribe to listen at www.futurecommerce.com/plus.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
2 min
September 02Retail Media In Your Ears: Inside Dollar General's 21,000-Store Audio Network
The next big advertising opportunity is here. The audio systems in Dollar General’s 21,000 stores connect shoppers with advertisers and drive loyalty. Austin Leonard, VP and GM of Dollar General Media Network (DGMN), sits down with Phillip and Alicia to explain why the retailer has doubled down on audio and the role that non-endemic advertisers play in his long-term vision.
“The Cocktail Party Effect”
Key takeaways:
In-store audio is getting programmatic optimization so DG’s sponsors can serve ads at the best time of day and in the best-suited markets.

Non-endemic only works in-store if it clears the near-endemic bar: shopper relevance.

Dollar General’s 21,000 stores across suburban, urban, and rural markets are often the only stores in town, making its ad inventory a community utility.

The Yellow Glasses Project pairs brand partners with the DG Literacy Foundation via iHeartRadio.

[00:18:10] Phillip: "This is the power that I think audio has that nothing else has; it can catch your attention even when you're focused on something else."

[00:32:40] Austin Leonard: "I call that the last mile of eCommerce for the last mile of America."

[00:36:15] Austin Leonard: "The next era of retail media is really about accountability and also telling our story for our unique audiences."
In-Show Mentions:
Find Austin Leonard on LinkedIn

More about DG Media Network

Yellow Glasses Project

iHeartMedia, DG Literacy Foundation partnership featuring Bobby Bones

Listen to Future Commerce’s episode with Collin Colburn of IAB
Associated Links:
More retail media coverage on Future Commerce retail media hub

Read: Insiders 237: “Vertical Dramas” and the New Era of Commerce Media

Listen: LIVE from Shoptalk Spring: Retail Media Confessions, Hype Cycles, and the Creator Reckoning

Read: Ad Infinitum: Retail Media is The Final Boss

VISIONS Summit at MoMA, New York City: Join us on November 3

Watch: Future Commerce on YouTube

Join Future Commerce Plus for exclusive content and save on merch and print

Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce world

Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce
Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
40 min
August 262026 Signals We’re Tracking: Commerce Evolves (Again), the Monoculture is Back, and Celebrity Prevails?
Phillip sits solo to unpack conflicting economic signals: Shopify's monster quarter against a Census report showing eCommerce eating share while retail overall slows. What does this mean for brick-and-mortar? Although stores still make up most retail sales, their mission and value have shifted. The good has become secondary to the experience of acquiring it. Plus, he breaks down why the monoculture returned in a summer of shared events, and what's on the FC docket through November 3rd.
The Monoculture Isn’t Dead, It’s On Substack
Key takeaways:
Commerce is growing (online sales grew at nearly twice retail’s pace in 2025), but it’s growing by disappearing into everything else.

The product itself is secondary to the experience of purchasing it.

The monoculture isn't dead; it’s been revived by sport, tours, and global events.

"There is a monoculture now of people writing about the summer of the monoculture on their Substack."

"You're not just communicating your vision anymore to the human capital within your business; you now have to communicate vision to machines and put it into machine language. Because increasingly, we are automating more and more of our vision, and it's going on autopilot."
In-Show Mentions:
See our Celebrity Brands Hub before the Signal Report launches

Spotify Summer Trends Report

Get your early bird ticket for VISIONS Summit: NYC
Associated Links:
Check out Future Commerce on YouTube

Check out Future Commerce Plus for exclusive content and save on merch and print

Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce world

Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce
Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
28 min
August 19Shopify Earnings Go Wild, and American Retail is OVER.
Phillip and Alicia open the back-to-school season with a modern dichotomy: NRF data shows shoppers playing chicken, while Shopify posts a quarter where agentic traffic tripled. PLUS: After a summer abroad in London, Phillip reflects on behaviors unique to U.S. shoppers.
Get ‘Em While They’re Young
Key takeaways:
Retailers are manufacturing visible human effort as a hedge against frictionless AI commerce.

Play is a form of consumption. Browsing kids are already converting.

Back-to-school splits into two camps: early movers and deal holdouts.

Shopify's agentic traffic tripled as answer engines are becoming a back-to-school search surface.

U.S. share of wallet favors experience, forcing a fusion of retail and hospitality.

[00:17:11] Alicia: "When you create these spaces that are conducive to young people, you're kind of creating this magnet moment that ultimately motivates them to shop."

[00:28:18] Phillip: "What’s really wild about the mini brands thing is…we all complain about shrinkflation, then also buy the mini of something, which is a premiumization of a per-unit cost…We are irrational by nature, and brands would do well to play at both ends of the spectrum."

[00:40:17] Alicia: "[Søstrene Grene] almost feels like it's more high-touch because it's kind of imperfect."
Associated Links:
Check out Future Commerce on YouTube

Check out Future Commerce Plus for exclusive content and save on merch and print

Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce world

Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce
Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
52 min
August 12Enter Through the Gift Shop: Inside MoMA's Retail Journey
MoMA welcomes three million people to its Midtown campus in a good year. But the beloved cultural institution now has the power to reach multiples of that through a hoodie, a Lego set, and a chicken-shaped cutting board. Chief Retail Officer, Jesse Goldstine, joins the show to explain how MoMA inverted the museum retail model, how every product in the store thoughtfully ties back to MoMA’s art, and where the design institution draws the line between rolling out AI partnerships while protecting human craft.
Until the AI Overlords Say Otherwise
Key takeaways:
Museums historically have defaulted to funneling visitors through the gift shop last. MoMA inverted the formula, shifting the museum’s point-of-entry to retail channels.

Cutting SKUs in SoHo raised productivity per SKU and clarified brand identity.

Licensing starts and ends with one question: why MoMA?

Discovery and gifting resist automation in ways basic replenishment does not.

[00:24:04] Jesse: "The DNA of our business is rooted in decisions made by humans in our curatorial department…I will continue to defer to them and put my faith in them until our AI overlords tell me that I need to behave differently."

[00:26:43] Jesse: "There's something really special about our brand that... will sort of inoculate it against some sort of automated sock repurchase every six months."
In-Show Mentions:
Join us at VISIONS: NYC at MoMa on November 3!

MoMA Design Stores

MoMA licensing partners: LEGO, Mattel Creations, Uniqlo, Champion
Associated Links:
More on the intersection of art, culture, and commerce: Insiders #186

Check out Future Commerce on YouTube

Check out Future Commerce Plus for exclusive content and save on merch and print

Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce world

Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce
Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
29 min
August 05Commerce Media's Day Two: The Agentic Shelf and the Measurement Reckoning
Retail media is now a $100 billion industry. Collin Colburn, VP of Commerce and Retail Media at the IAB, says we’ve entered commerce media's "day two" – the era where operational integration, interoperable measurement, and the arrival of the agentic shelf matter more than launching another network.
We unpack why brands started calling retail media a tax, why Collin says we should blow attribution up, and whether an ad-supported agent can stay trustworthy.
Welcome to Day Two
Key takeaways:
Optimization and integration replace growth-at-all-costs expansion.

Brands call retail media a “tax,” sensing the industry's referee is now incrementality.

Agent-referred shoppers convert higher and return less.

In-store media's ceiling is customer experience, not inventory: frequency caps beat non-endemic dollars.

[14:05] "Agentic commerce isn't changing what consumers buy or want to buy today. It's changing their pathway to purchase." — Collin Colburn

[19:35] “The coming reckoning is in the measurement space.” –– Collin Colburn

[20:45] "Attribution was built for: an ad is served, it's clicked on or seen, the customer goes to the website, and they purchase. That model does not work well in this new era." — Collin Colburn

[25:15] "AI feels objective to me for the most part… it's like your omnipotent friend that you never had. And when ads get introduced, it begs the question of, am I still gonna trust that agent?" — Collin Colburn
In-Show Mentions:
Commerce Media Has Hit “Day Two.” Now What?

EMarketer: IAB’s Collin Colburn on the Future of Commerce Media

More about IAB
Associated Links:
VISIONS Summit, Nov 3 at MoMA

Check out Future Commerce on YouTube

Check out Future Commerce Plus for exclusive content and save on merch and print

Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce world

Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce
Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
44 min

About Future Commerce

From the publisher's feed

Future Commerce is the culture magazine for Commerce. Hosts Phillip Jackson and Brian Lange help brand and digital marketing leaders see around the next corner by exploring the intersection of Culture and Commerce.