Mar 2, 2026
Paramark takes on the desert at eTail
A few days in the desert
Palm Springs in February. Sunshine, retail marketers, and a little booth we were very proud of. We showed up to eTail with a goal to have real conversations. To chat with the people actually responsible for measuring marketing performance at some of the best ecommerce and retail brands in the business.
Not a 'pitch decks shoved across tables' kind of trip. Just honest talk about what's working, what isn't, and where measurement is genuinely breaking down.
What we heard
A few high-level takeaways we noticed from talking to folks at #217.
Attribution is not talked about enough
It's amazing how many teams still rely on last-click and platform-reported numbers - and how uncomfortable that's starting to make everyone as ad costs rise and finance ask harder questions.
Everyone's doing AI - not everyone is measuring it.
AI was everywhere at eTail - agentic commerce, AI-driven personalization, automated creative. The part nobody wants to say out loud: most teams have no idea if it's actually working. They're shipping AI features faster than they can build measurement frameworks to evaluate them.
The sessions on retail media ROI and rethinking ROAS scratched the surface, but the honest conversation in the hallways was that attribution is more broken than ever when AI is touching every part of the funnel.
Performance vs. brand is a false choice - and retail is finally figuring that out
One of the clearest themes across sessions was the tension between performance marketing and brand building. For the last few years, rising acquisition costs pushed almost everyone toward pure performance. What eTail made clear is the pendulum is swinging back - not away from performance, but toward the realization that brand is what makes performance sustainable.
The brands growing right now aren't choosing one or the other. They're measuring both. Which means the measurement problem just got harder.
So, was it worth it?
The industry is ready to move beyond single-source attribution. People know last-click is dead. They just need a clear path to something better.
We came away with a solid batch of conversations we're genuinely excited to continue - and if any of this resonates, whether you were in Palm Springs or not, we'd love to show you what Paramark looks like in practice.
