The Azimuth Brief: Sam’s Club’s One-Hour Delivery, MarTech Replacement Rates Slow, Affiliate Content Performance, and Ulta Beauty and Agentic Commerce
Today's retail and marketing brief covers Sam's Club's aggressive move into ultra-fast delivery, the slowdown in MarTech platform churn, growing attribution challenges for affiliate marketers in the AI age, and Ulta Beauty's deployment of agentic commerce through Google Gemini.
Today's stories:
• Sam's Club launches one-hour express delivery nationwide
• MarTech replacement rates drop as companies shift focus to efficiency
• Brands struggle to measure affiliate content performance in the AI age
• Ulta Beauty deploys agentic commerce with Google Gemini
1. Sam's Club Launches One-Hour Express Delivery Nationwide
Sam's Club has rolled out one-hour Express delivery across all 600-plus stores, taking aim at Amazon's delivery dominance with a $10 service for Plus members. Since launching on April 2, the retailer has fulfilled nearly 65,000 orders with an average delivery time of 55 minutes. The 10 fastest deliveries clocked in under 12 minutes.
Members now choose between two tiers: the new one-hour service ($10 for Plus, $22 for Club members) or the existing three-hour option ($5 for Plus, $17 for Club). There's no purchase minimum, and items are priced the same as in-club with no markups.
What people are ordering reveals the shift from novelty to necessity. A significant share includes everyday essentials like bottled water, produce, rotisserie chicken, and paper goods. New parents in Amarillo got baby supplies in 11 minutes. Pet owners in Louisville received cat food at the same time.
2. MarTech Replacement Rates Slow as Companies Shift Focus to Efficiency
Source: MarTech.org
Marketing technology replacement rates are declining as companies shift from constant platform churn to extracting more value from existing stacks. Rather than ripping and replacing every few years, marketing leaders are doubling down on optimization, integration, and getting teams to actually use the tools they already have.
The change reflects broader economic pressure and MarTech maturation. Budgets are tighter, implementations are expensive, and switching costs are real. Teams are realizing that the problem often isn't the technology itself, but how it's deployed, integrated, and adopted across the organization.
This shift from churn to efficiency has implications for both vendors and practitioners. Vendors need to focus on retention, expansion, and proving ROI rather than purely acquisition. For marketers, it means getting serious about change management, training, and making sure the stack they have is fully leveraged before adding more to it.
3. Brands Struggle to Measure Affiliate Content Performance in the AI Age
Brands like Adobe and Away are finding it increasingly difficult to measure how well their affiliate content performs as AI search engines and chatbots reshape discovery. Traditional tracking mechanisms break down when content gets summarized, rewritten, or pulled into AI-generated responses rather than driving direct clicks to publisher sites.
The challenge is attribution. When someone asks an AI assistant for product recommendations, and the AI synthesizes information from affiliate content without sending users to the original review or comparison article, how do you measure that influence? How do you credit the affiliate partner when the transaction happens three steps removed from their content?
This is a problem. Affiliate marketing has traditionally relied on clear click-and-conversion paths. AI intermediaries muddy those waters. Brands and affiliates will need new frameworks for tracking influence and crediting referrals in an environment where content gets consumed indirectly through AI summaries rather than direct site visits.
4. Ulta Beauty Deploys Agentic Commerce with Google Gemini
Ulta Beauty is making its products shoppable directly within Google Search and the Gemini app, adopting the Universal Commerce Protocol to enable agentic commerce. The retailer is also launching Ulta AI, a shopping assistant built with Gemini Enterprise that leverages insights from Ulta's 46 million member base.
The UCP integration allows AI agents to interact with Ulta's ecommerce platform, meaning shoppers can discover, compare, and complete purchases without leaving the AI interface. This puts Ulta into the emerging agentic commerce flow where discovery, intent, and purchase are stitched together in a single interaction.
Beauty is a high-friction vertical where visual signals, brand trust, and personalization matter. Ulta's loyalty dataset and curated assortments give it a defensible advantage versus general marketplaces that win on logistics. The partnership positions Ulta to capture demand as shopping behavior shifts from browsing sites to asking assistants for recommendations.
That's it for today.