Ricardo Belmar Says Shoppers Accept Ads. He Clicks Past Amazon's Sponsored Ones.

Ricardo Belmar runs the Retail Razor Podcast Network and used to be a retail marketing director at Microsoft. On The ADOTAT Show he argued the thing nobody says on a panel: consumers are fine with ads. His evidence is the money. Ad budgets keep going up, and if nobody clicked, he says, advertisers would stop paying. Streaming is his second exhibit. It was born as the way to skip commercials, and then every streamer added a cheaper ad tier and signed up more people. That is not a revolt. That is people doing math.

On retail media he splits the difference. It is partly proof shoppers accept ads and partly retailers finally selling data they sat on for years. The episode puts the business near $50 billion. Belmar has Amazon and Walmart taking about 85%, and counts well over 200 other networks. Worth noting: the same week, ADOTAT's Wire cited Reuters putting the two giants at about 88% of an estimated $74.4 billion US market. Nobody counts this business the same way twice. His sharpest point is about stores, not screens. Associates field the same 40 easy questions out of every 100. Automate those, he says, and people get time for the 60 that turn into sales.

Then there is the anecdote that undoes the thesis. Belmar says he often sees a sponsored listing beside the organic one for the same product from the same seller, and he clicks the unpaid one. ADOTAT's paywalled fact check calls it what it is: avoidance with good manners. The seller paid for a click it would have earned free. In retail media that is paying for sales you would have gotten anyway. And rising spend proves advertisers believe ads work, not that consumers like them, especially when the seller of the ad also grades it.

He also made a call with a due date. Recorded in June, he predicted AI-assisted shopping could surge as early as this holiday season. ADOTAT says the announcements have arrived and the adoption has not been measured yet, and promises to check his math in January. His warning for brands holds either way: much of a product page sits in scripted code that chatbots cannot read. If the bot cannot see your product, it will not sell your product. Where he lands is the line worth keeping: consumers don't hate ads. They hate bad ads.