Dick’s, CVS and Fluent Find Commerce Media’s Next Growth Spurts
CANNES, France – Commerce media has reached the awkward stage of its development when simply showing up with shopper data no longer counts as a personality.
During a panel at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, executives from Dick’s Sporting Goods, CVS Media Exchange and Fluent said the next phase will require retail media networks to differentiate themselves, recruit advertisers from outside their traditional categories and turn physical stores into measurable media channels.
Tameka Kee, a Beet.TV contributor, moderated the discussion, titled “Who’s Actually Building the Next Phase of Commerce Media?”
Retail media enters its toddler years
David Young, vice president of retail media at Dick’s Sporting Goods, described the first generation of retail media as an effort to replicate a familiar marketplace playbook. The second generation is about establishing what makes each network distinctive.
With more than 250 commerce and retail media networks competing for advertising, merely possessing transaction data is no longer enough. Retailers need to explain how their customer relationships can influence purchase behavior.
For Dick’s, that relationship centers on the “athletic family.” The definition is generous.
“If you shop at Dick’s Sporting Goods, congratulations, you’re an athlete,” Young said, clarifying that he meant customers rather than LeBron James.
Paul Lentz, head of strategic development at CVS Media Exchange, said retail media may have graduated from infancy, although it should not be trusted near an open staircase just yet.
“We’re probably toddlers if you think about life stages of retail media networks,” Lentz said.
CMX builds its offering around CVS’s ExtraCare loyalty program, which has 90 million addressable members. The network combines those customer signals with offsite activation, closed-loop measurement and a growing collection of in-store media surfaces.
Loyalty would like to start paying rent
Tim Lukens, president of commerce media at Fluent, identified loyalty and in-store advertising as two of the industry’s biggest growth opportunities.
A loyalty identifier is more than another audience label, he said. It can connect online and in-store behavior, help advertisers understand downstream purchases and support rewards such as points, cash or coupons.
The commercial goal is to turn loyalty programs from an expense into a source of profit while still giving customers something worthwhile in return. Airlines and credit-card companies have already demonstrated the potential. Retailers are now reaching for the same prize, preferably without converting every reward into a coupon worth 17 cents.
“It’s turning that loyalty from a cost to an actual profit center,” Lukens said.
Lentz said expansion into complementary advertising categories can make loyalty programs more useful than a stack of discounts. That prompted the inevitable discussion of CVS receipts, those celebrated paper scrolls that can make the purchase of toothpaste feel like the signing of an international treaty.
Non-endemic gets a rebrand
The panelists agreed that “non-endemic” is losing favor as a label. Young prefers “complementary,” partly because prospective advertisers do not particularly enjoy being described with a term that sounds like a public-health warning.
At Dick’s, complementary categories can include automobiles, quick-service restaurants, consumer packaged goods, financial services, entertainment and travel. These products fit the lives of families spending weekends driving between games, tournaments and emergency cleat purchases.
Young said the selection process involves “a little science” and “a little art.” Data helps identify promising categories, but any partner must make sense within the retailer’s customer experience.
A whiskey promotion aimed at families shopping for youth sports equipment, for example, received a quick rejection during the discussion.
“Sounds cool, not the right brand,” Young said.
CVS applies a similar filter around health and wellness. Lentz noted that the pharmacy chain stopped selling cigarettes more than a decade ago, making tobacco advertising an obvious nonstarter. Alcohol also falls outside the boundaries CMX is drawing.
Brand compatibility still leaves substantial room for expansion. A hotel offer shown after a parent buys lacrosse cleats, Lukens said, may be highly relevant even though Dick’s does not sell accommodations.
“The customer is the algorithm at the end of the day,” he said.
Stores become media, finally
In-store advertising has generated plenty of conference conversation but less execution. Lentz said the novelty is not advertising inside stores, which has existed for ages. It is the expectation that retailers can bring digital-style targeting and measurement into a physical environment.
That requires upgraded point-of-sale systems, better infrastructure and processes that have moved beyond manual spreadsheets.
“We can’t run stuff in spreadsheets anymore,” Lentz said, delivering the sort of statement that could cause several departments to quietly minimize their screens.
Dick’s has concentrated its early in-store experiments in its House of Sport locations. The stores are about twice the size of a typical Dick’s and may include a football field and batting cages. Young called the concept “an FAO Schwarz for sports.”
One activation, called “lift and learn,” combines RFID-tagged footwear with seven-foot digital displays and magnetized shelving. When a shopper picks up a shoe, the screen changes its video and audio content. Dick’s can measure how long products remain in shoppers’ hands, how many try-on requests follow and whether sales change.
The results are not invariably flattering.
“Advertising doesn’t fix product that doesn’t work,” Young said.
Even an unsuccessful sales result can provide useful product intelligence. If customers repeatedly pick up a shoe but decline to try it on or buy it, the problem may not be a shortage of impressions.
The cash register gets another job
Fluent and CVS are also working to bring complementary advertising into the post-purchase experience. Lukens said CVS was well into the rollout of new point-of-sale systems that can support advertising at checkout.
The companies plan to use loyalty signals and a Databricks clean room to match audiences in a privacy-conscious way, deliver offers and measure subsequent activity.
Lentz said CVS has continually studied customer reaction to ads on checkout screens. More than 67% of the responses have been positive, helped by the relevance of the messages.
CMX also works with Circana to measure sales beyond CVS. A customer identified as being interested in body wash may see an ad through CVS but purchase the product from another retailer. Rest-of-market reporting can help demonstrate that the campaign produced a broader sales lift even when CVS did not ring the final register.
Not every impression needs a tiny courtroom trial
The industry’s fixation on incrementality and return on ad spend also received some pushback.
Young said retail media networks must resist reducing every campaign to immediate incremental sales if they want to compete for brand budgets. Test-and-control studies and sales-lift measurements remain valuable, but some advertising builds awareness or affinity outside a convenient attribution window.
“Not everything is a performance marketing channel and it should not be treated as such,” Young said.
Physical stores can encompass the entire marketing funnel in a single visit, Lentz added. Someone entering CVS to collect a prescription may discover a hydration product through an audio message or endcap display before making an unplanned purchase. Not every influence will submit neatly to one-to-one attribution, no matter how sternly the spreadsheet asks.
The next phase needs fewer clones
Looking toward the next year, Young said commerce media networks must differentiate themselves through their customer identities and insights. Their value lies not only in recording purchases but in understanding the circumstances that shape them.
Lentz hopes more agency and brand money will flow through retail media networks rather than leaving them dependent on traditional shopper-marketing budgets.
Lukens framed the larger choice facing retailers: Are they building another media network or improving the customer experience in a way that creates trust and can eventually be monetized?
The answer may determine which of those 250-plus networks mature into serious advertising businesses and which remain toddlers with excellent first-party data.
You’re watching The Beet.TV Leadership Sessions at Cannes Lions 2026, presented by Fluent. For more videos from this series, please visit this page. You can find all of our coverage from Cannes Lions 2026 here.
CANNES, France – Commerce media has reached the awkward stage of its development when simply showing up with shopper data no longer counts as a personality.
During a panel at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, executives from Dick’s Sporting Goods, CVS Media Exchange and Fluent said the next phase will require retail media networks to differentiate themselves, recruit advertisers from outside their traditional categories and turn physical stores into measurable media channels.
Tameka Kee, a Beet.TV contributor, moderated the discussion, titled “Who’s Actually Building the Next Phase of Commerce Media?”
Retail media enters its toddler years
David Young, vice president of retail media at Dick’s Sporting Goods, described the first generation of retail media as an effort to replicate a familiar marketplace playbook. The second generation is about establishing what makes each network distinctive.
With more than 250 commerce and retail media networks competing for advertising, merely possessing transaction data is no longer enough. Retailers need to explain how their customer relationships can influence purchase behavior.
For Dick’s, that relationship centers on the “athletic family.” The definition is generous.
“If you shop at Dick’s Sporting Goods, congratulations, you’re an athlete,” Young said, clarifying that he meant customers rather than LeBron James.
Paul Lentz, head of strategic development at CVS Media Exchange, said retail media may have graduated from infancy, although it should not be trusted near an open staircase just yet.
“We’re probably toddlers if you think about life stages of retail media networks,” Lentz said.
CMX builds its offering around CVS’s ExtraCare loyalty program, which has 90 million addressable members. The network combines those customer signals with offsite activation, closed-loop measurement and a growing collection of in-store media surfaces.
Loyalty would like to start paying rent
Tim Lukens, president of commerce media at Fluent, identified loyalty and in-store advertising as two of the industry’s biggest growth opportunities.
A loyalty identifier is more than another audience label, he said. It can connect online and in-store behavior, help advertisers understand downstream purchases and support rewards such as points, cash or coupons.
The commercial goal is to turn loyalty programs from an expense into a source of profit while still giving customers something worthwhile in return. Airlines and credit-card companies have already demonstrated the potential. Retailers are now reaching for the same prize, preferably without converting every reward into a coupon worth 17 cents.
“It’s turning that loyalty from a cost to an actual profit center,” Lukens said.
Lentz said expansion into complementary advertising categories can make loyalty programs more useful than a stack of discounts. That prompted the inevitable discussion of CVS receipts, those celebrated paper scrolls that can make the purchase of toothpaste feel like the signing of an international treaty.
Non-endemic gets a rebrand
The panelists agreed that “non-endemic” is losing favor as a label. Young prefers “complementary,” partly because prospective advertisers do not particularly enjoy being described with a term that sounds like a public-health warning.
At Dick’s, complementary categories can include automobiles, quick-service restaurants, consumer packaged goods, financial services, entertainment and travel. These products fit the lives of families spending weekends driving between games, tournaments and emergency cleat purchases.
Young said the selection process involves “a little science” and “a little art.” Data helps identify promising categories, but any partner must make sense within the retailer’s customer experience.
A whiskey promotion aimed at families shopping for youth sports equipment, for example, received a quick rejection during the discussion.
“Sounds cool, not the right brand,” Young said.
CVS applies a similar filter around health and wellness. Lentz noted that the pharmacy chain stopped selling cigarettes more than a decade ago, making tobacco advertising an obvious nonstarter. Alcohol also falls outside the boundaries CMX is drawing.
Brand compatibility still leaves substantial room for expansion. A hotel offer shown after a parent buys lacrosse cleats, Lukens said, may be highly relevant even though Dick’s does not sell accommodations.
“The customer is the algorithm at the end of the day,” he said.
Stores become media, finally
In-store advertising has generated plenty of conference conversation but less execution. Lentz said the novelty is not advertising inside stores, which has existed for ages. It is the expectation that retailers can bring digital-style targeting and measurement into a physical environment.
That requires upgraded point-of-sale systems, better infrastructure and processes that have moved beyond manual spreadsheets.
“We can’t run stuff in spreadsheets anymore,” Lentz said, delivering the sort of statement that could cause several departments to quietly minimize their screens.
Dick’s has concentrated its early in-store experiments in its House of Sport locations. The stores are about twice the size of a typical Dick’s and may include a football field and batting cages. Young called the concept “an FAO Schwarz for sports.”
One activation, called “lift and learn,” combines RFID-tagged footwear with seven-foot digital displays and magnetized shelving. When a shopper picks up a shoe, the screen changes its video and audio content. Dick’s can measure how long products remain in shoppers’ hands, how many try-on requests follow and whether sales change.
The results are not invariably flattering.
“Advertising doesn’t fix product that doesn’t work,” Young said.
Even an unsuccessful sales result can provide useful product intelligence. If customers repeatedly pick up a shoe but decline to try it on or buy it, the problem may not be a shortage of impressions.
The cash register gets another job
Fluent and CVS are also working to bring complementary advertising into the post-purchase experience. Lukens said CVS was well into the rollout of new point-of-sale systems that can support advertising at checkout.
The companies plan to use loyalty signals and a Databricks clean room to match audiences in a privacy-conscious way, deliver offers and measure subsequent activity.
Lentz said CVS has continually studied customer reaction to ads on checkout screens. More than 67% of the responses have been positive, helped by the relevance of the messages.
CMX also works with Circana to measure sales beyond CVS. A customer identified as being interested in body wash may see an ad through CVS but purchase the product from another retailer. Rest-of-market reporting can help demonstrate that the campaign produced a broader sales lift even when CVS did not ring the final register.
Not every impression needs a tiny courtroom trial
The industry’s fixation on incrementality and return on ad spend also received some pushback.
Young said retail media networks must resist reducing every campaign to immediate incremental sales if they want to compete for brand budgets. Test-and-control studies and sales-lift measurements remain valuable, but some advertising builds awareness or affinity outside a convenient attribution window.
“Not everything is a performance marketing channel and it should not be treated as such,” Young said.
Physical stores can encompass the entire marketing funnel in a single visit, Lentz added. Someone entering CVS to collect a prescription may discover a hydration product through an audio message or endcap display before making an unplanned purchase. Not every influence will submit neatly to one-to-one attribution, no matter how sternly the spreadsheet asks.
The next phase needs fewer clones
Looking toward the next year, Young said commerce media networks must differentiate themselves through their customer identities and insights. Their value lies not only in recording purchases but in understanding the circumstances that shape them.
Lentz hopes more agency and brand money will flow through retail media networks rather than leaving them dependent on traditional shopper-marketing budgets.
Lukens framed the larger choice facing retailers: Are they building another media network or improving the customer experience in a way that creates trust and can eventually be monetized?
The answer may determine which of those 250-plus networks mature into serious advertising businesses and which remain toddlers with excellent first-party data.
You’re watching The Beet.TV Leadership Sessions at Cannes Lions 2026, presented by Fluent. For more videos from this series, please visit this page. You can find all of our coverage from Cannes Lions 2026 here.
