From the collapse of the purchase funnel to why AI alone won't fix campaign performance, our top takeaways from eTail Palm Springs 2026.
We spent the week in Palm Springs at eTail Palm Springs alongside 2,500+ senior retail and ecommerce leaders. After four days of main-stage keynotes, breakouts, happy hours, and a lot of honest hallway conversation, the shift in tone from a year ago was impossible to miss.
Last year, eTail was largely about AI's potential. This year it was about the gap between that potential and actual results, and what separates the brands closing it from the ones still waiting.
Here are our top six takeaways from eTail Palm Springs 2026.
A year ago, the dominant question at eTail was some version of "should we be investing in AI?" That question is gone. What replaced it is harder: "Why aren't our AI initiatives delivering the way we expected?"
That shift matters for performance marketing leaders specifically. It means the experimentation phase is largely over, and the organizations that ran pilots without building the operational foundation to support them are now dealing with the consequences: inconclusive data, skeptical stakeholders, and AI tools that have been adopted in name but not in practice.
Tari Huddleston, Global VP of Digital & eCommerce at Revelyst, captured it plainly on stage: "AI wasn't a project. It still isn't a project. It's literally a way in which we're operating going forward." She also delivered the week's most practical warning. “Bad data does not get better when AI gets involved. It only gets worse and amplifies it.” For teams still early in adoption, data infrastructure isn't a prerequisite to get to eventually. It's the prerequisite.
Kristin Shane, REI's Chief Merchandising Officer, reinforced this from an organizational angle, describing AI accountability at REI as jointly owned by the Chief People Officer and the Chief Technology Officer, not IT alone.
When AI governance sits at that intersection, it signals a fundamentally different level of organizational commitment to making it work.
Every brand at eTail has AI pilots. Far fewer have results. The gap between the two kept surfacing across sessions, and the brands that had crossed it shared a consistent explanation: they stopped treating AI as a tool and built it into how their teams actually operate.
David's Bridal CEO Kelly Cook's session was the conference's most striking example. After two bankruptcies, the company rebuilt itself entirely around AI-powered first-party data and predictive personalization. The transformation worked not because the tools were better, but because the organization committed to running on them.
The consensus across sessions was clear: AI amplifies whatever infrastructure you already have. If your creative-to-campaign workflow is fragmented, AI makes fragmented output faster. The brands seeing real performance gains built the system first, then deployed technology into it.
The Wednesday main-stage panel framed this as bluntly as we've heard it. The conversation brought together goop CMO Alexa Ritacco, Sur La Table VP of Brand Kristin Flor Perret, Stitch Fix VP of Client Experience Noah Zamansky, Chinese Laundry CMO Sarah Zurell, and moderator Jaysen Gillespie to examine what they called the "funnel collapse."
The argument: customers no longer move linearly from awareness to purchase. They discover on TikTok, research via AI, and convert somewhere else entirely, sometimes in a single session. The path is non-linear, multi-touchpoint, and getting shorter.
What that means for performance marketing teams is significant. A collapsed funnel doesn't reduce the demand for creative. It multiplies it. Every touchpoint in that non-linear journey needs relevant, on-brand content, and the brands that show up consistently across all of them are the ones capturing purchase decisions that used to be more predictable. goop’s Alexa Ritacco has spoken extensively about navigating this pressure from the CMO seat (her framework for prioritizing speed without sacrificing brand integrity is worth reading in full).
For most enterprise teams, the volume requirement this new path creates is already outpacing what current production infrastructure can support. The funnel collapse isn't just a measurement problem. It's a creative operations problem.
PopSockets Global VP of E-commerce Jack Farrell walked through how the brand built an internal AI system, BEAM (Breakdown Engine for Ad Metrics), that analyzes performance across thousands of Meta ads, identifying winning combinations of copy, image, and product at scale.
The outcome: a 50% increase in revenue and profitability from scaling Meta ad production.
What made the presentation valuable wasn't the result. It was the problem framing that preceded it: "You can't just tell your designers and your creative team, 'Hey, I need 500 ads.' Or, 'I need 1000 ads.' 'I need 2,000.' That doesn't work. You need a system, you need a feedback loop, some systematic approach to this problem."
That's the gap most enterprise marketing teams haven't fully reckoned with. Creative volume is achievable. Creative intelligence, the feedback loop that tells you why something works and applies that learning to the next brief, is what most teams are still building manually, if at all.
The brands that have closed this loop aren't just producing more ads. They're producing ads that compound in effectiveness over time, because each test informs the next. That compounding advantage is what makes creative operations a strategic investment, not just a production function.
Vuori Global President Ashley Kechter's fireside chat addressed the challenge every high-growth brand faces: how do you maintain the human-centered brand identity that drove your growth when the operational demands of scaling, more channels, more markets, more campaigns, are pulling in the opposite direction?
The brands that answered this well at eTail weren't the ones with stronger brand values. They were the ones with better systems for translating those values into consistent creative execution at scale. REI's Kristin Shane made this concrete: brand trust isn't built by big gestures. It's built by the accumulation of small decisions, all pointing in the same direction.
That consistency is hard to maintain when creative production is decentralized, approval cycles are long, and performance teams are pulling assets in different directions for different channels. The infrastructure question and the brand identity question are the same question.
The performance marketing conversations at eTail kept circling back to one differentiator: testing velocity. The brands seeing the best ROAS improvements weren't the ones with the biggest media budgets. They were the ones running the most creative variations, learning faster, and applying those learnings to the next campaign before their competitors had launched their last one.
That's only possible if the distance between a creative brief and a live ad is measured in days, not weeks. For most enterprise teams, it isn't, and that gap is where campaign performance is actually lost, long before a media dollar is spent.
More touchpoints. More creative demand. AI that amplifies the infrastructure you already have, not the one you wish you had. Brand identity that only holds at scale if the systems behind it do. The performance advantage goes to the brands that test faster, not the ones that spend more.
Every one of these converges on the same question: how do you close the gap between creative output and campaign execution? That's the problem that defined eTail 2026, and it's the right place for any marketing leader to start.
It's also the problem Adora was built to solve. If these are challenges your team is navigating heading into the rest of the year, we'd be glad to share what we're seeing.
