The Cannes Lions panel brought together leaders from the retail media world for a candid conversation on the state of the sector, its growing pains, and what comes next. Moderated by Justin Pearse, Editor in Chief of Retail Media Age, the panel included: Thibault Hennion, COO Unlimitail; Teresa Fusaro, Senior Director Gen AI Creativity Tech & Digital, Reckitt; Rosie Houston, MD for UK Retail Partnerships, SMG; Ana-Laura Zain, Co-founder, Women in Retail Media Collective, and CMO, Pentaleap; and Laura Belchier, Head of Consumer Experience Brands at Amazon Ads UK.
Retailers become media owners
One of the panel’s starting points was the striking shift in mindset that’s occurred in recent years. As Pearse put it, “Retailers are no longer just selling beans, they’re becoming publishers.” Teresa Fusaro agreed, adding that the change has been accelerated by platforms offering “a variety of different formats,” from video to branded content, which bring retailers closer to the creative and strategic functions typically associated with media owners.
Rosie Houston noted that many retailers are still grappling with the implications of this new identity.
“They want to share transparent results,” she said, “but legacy systems built for retail, not media, create significant obstacles.” Despite this, Houston was optimistic about the direction of travel, observing that with the right infrastructure, “retail media works. It delivers better customer engagement metrics, and it works for brands and retailers alike.”
The measurement dilemma
If one challenge overshadowed the rest, it was measurement. The ability to track and prove ROI remains a sticking point for many players in the space.
“It’s relatively easy to deliver media,” said Thibault Hennion, “but much harder to measure its effectiveness on a day-to-day basis.” He emphasized the need for collaboration between retailers, brands, and ad tech players to agree on “common KPIs and a shared methodology.”
Amazon’s Laura Belchier echoed this sentiment, recalling the platform’s early days when “we didn’t even have a ROAS metric.”
Today, she said, “we partner with third-party measurement companies and are integrating with MMM and others, but we’re still not where we need to be to track the full journey—especially offline.”
Ana Laura Zain pointed to the rise of AI-driven search and how this could further complicate attribution models. “If you’re searching via ChatGPT or using AI search tools,” she said, “you’re not clicking ads in the traditional sense. How do we attribute influence and value in that scenario?”
This question, she argued, is at the heart of the retail media industry’s next wave of challenges.
AI’s creative transformation
When it comes to creative execution, AI is proving a game-changer. Teresa Fusaro was enthusiastic about the technology’s potential to streamline and democratise creative production.
“The whole process, from briefing to local adaptation, used to take several weeks,” she said. “Now it can be done in hours.” This, she noted, enables brands to tailor creative to each retailer’s requirements more easily and affordably.
Zain added that the advances in AI search—and the scale of projected investment in that area—will soon mirror the hype seen in retail media. “eMarketer says AI search ad spend is expected to hit £25 billion by 2029,” she said. “That’s huge. But the way we think about search, advertising, and even how we structure our websites will have to evolve.”
Fragmentation and scale
A consistent refrain throughout the discussion was the difficulty of scaling retail media campaigns across a fragmented ecosystem.
“The biggest challenge is fragmentation,” said Zain. “There are too many different platforms and measurement systems. It’s hard for a small brand to scale efficiently.”
Fusaro agreed and highlighted the potential for AI to help overcome this complexity.
“AI allows us to build intermediation layers,” she said, “to harmonise data between retailers and brands. That just wasn’t possible before.” Hennion added that collaboration on “shared data lakes” could be the key to unlocking a more unified view of retail media performance.
Creativity returns to the spotlight
While data and tech are vital, creativity remains crucial—and many on the panel felt it had been neglected.
“We’ve spent so long focusing on getting the right messages to the right audience” said Houston, “that we’ve forgotten about creative differentiation.” She warned that without great creative, the best-targeted campaigns can still fall flat.
Belchier noted Amazon’s increasing emphasis on interactive, shoppable ads that help “close the loop through to purchase,” whether on Amazon itself or via external retailer sites. “This helps brands understand how their media plan drives conversion,” she said.
Houston called for more nuance in how brands approach creativity across different types of retailers. “What works for a grocer won’t necessarily work for other types of retailer,” she said. “You need to think about the customer mission in each store and build your creative strategy around that.”
In-store’s digital evolution
While much of retail media’s growth has been online, the in-store opportunity is impossible to ignore. Hennion argued for bespoke, high-quality creative tailored to individual store environments. “If we want to make retail sexy again, it has to be relevant to that specific store,” he said. “It’s not about scaling programmatic immediately. It’s about creating magic first.”
Houston stressed the value of in-store media, particularly in the UK where many retailers still see “over 90% of sales coming from physical locations.”
She welcomed the growing digitisation of stores and said brands should take a step back and think, “What is the shopper’s mission in this location?” Only then, she argued, can in-store media truly integrate with the full retail media journey.
Where the money comes from
Finally, the discussion turned to the source of retail media budgets—a hot-button issue. Belchier stated that retail media “should be part of any media plan,” rather than coming from siloed trade budgets. “It’s a signal, and ideally a way of measuring,” she said.
Fusaro highlighted the lack of a consistent retail media strategy within brands, where multiple teams might be spending on retail media without coordination. “Different departments can end up competing with each other,” she said. “There needs to be a full-funnel media approach to manage investment more holistically.”
As the panel concluded, the sense was clear: retail media has come of age, but only through continued collaboration, investment in measurement, and a renewed focus on creativity will it reach its full potential.
