CANNES — Retail media is booming, but with more than 250 retail media networks (RMNs) in play, and counting, brands and agencies are facing what one panelist called “overwhelming complexity.” At the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, industry leaders from Dentsu, The Trade Desk and Instacart agreed: the way forward lies in collaboration, simplification, and data-driven accountability.
Too many networks, too much complexity
Moderator Tameka Kee opened by asking whether the rapid proliferation of retail media networks was healthy competition or unmanageable clutter.
Brian Monahan, global client president at advertising and media agency Dentsu, didn’t hesitate: “Our buy-side clients think it’s overwhelming.”
Jeff Daniel of adtech firm The Trade Desk echoed the sentiment, admitting that even as someone helping retailers monetize data, “it can feel overwhelming at times.”
Still, Daniel argued that the challenge could be reframed as an opportunity: data, used strategically, can unify brand teams that rarely collaborate including shopper marketers, brand marketers and customer marketers.
Budgets, turf wars and astronomical targets
Monahan pointed out that at both retailers and brands, internal silos make collaboration hard. Brands often split budgets between marketing and customer teams, with different accounting methods that “shall never meet.”
Retailers, meanwhile, are setting up standalone RMN divisions with “astronomical revenue targets,” creating tension with merchandising teams.
Adam Silverblatt, who leads off-platform ad sales at Instacart, acknowledged those tensions but said his company’s strategy is built around “making it as easy as possible” for brands to adopt data-driven solutions and reduce complexity.
Measurement: Industry’s Achilles Heel
If fragmentation is problem number one, measurement is problem number two. Kee called it the “measurement puzzle”: every network has its own attribution model, making it nearly impossible for brands to compare ROI across platforms.
Daniel admitted there’s a “general lack of standardization,” while Monahan was more blunt: “All the noise around performance metrics is a lot of us trying to justify our jobs.”
He said brands don’t just want a flood of proxy metrics like ROAS; they want to feel the sales impact. Silverblatt added that as long as brand and commerce budgets remain siloed, “building measurement frameworks that are broadly adoptable is next to impossible.”
Promising partnership: Instacart x The Trade Desk
One bright spot: Instacart and The Trade Desk announced an integration that will make SKU-level commerce data available directly in programmatic buying.
Daniel said the collaboration streamlines data access and reduces operational headaches for retailers while giving agencies “faster access” to actionable insights.
Monahan called the pairing of Instacart’s transaction-level data and The Trade Desk’s reach “a phenomenal tool to find new category buyers.”
Consolidation, omnichannel and accountability
Looking ahead, panelists disagreed on where retail media is heading.
Silverblatt predicted eventual consolidation: “Brands and agencies can’t work with 250 networks. Nor can 250 networks actually demonstrate incrementality and uniqueness.”
He also forecast a future where true omnichannel marketing becomes real, pointing to innovations like shoppable ads on Roku.
Monahan, however, expects more networks, not fewer: “If you’re a retailer, you have to have this revenue line in your business model or you won’t be able to price competitively.”
But he agreed that brands will demand easier ways to calculate incremental return on ad spend and, ideally, more focus on creativity in driving growth.
Daniel summed up the near-term challenge in one word: accountability. “By next year, I’d hope we’re tighter as a collective community around how we define accountability, and leveraging real-time signals tied to business outcomes,” he said.
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