Retail Media Bridges Its Onsite-Offsite Divide with Improved Ties
CANNES, France – Retail media has spent years promising advertisers a seamless system connecting ads, shoppers and sales. The industry has also spent years handing marketers a collection of platforms, dashboards and passwords that suggest “seamless” may have been used in its loosest possible sense.
Dollar General Media Network is now working with The Trade Desk and Kevel Ads to bring its onsite and offsite advertising into one buying environment. The goal is to let advertisers use the same audiences, inventory controls and measurement as campaigns move between Dollar General’s digital properties and the open web.
Austin Leonard, vice president and general manager of Dollar General Media Network, discussed the effort with Matthew Fantazier, vice president of retail data partnerships at The Trade Desk, and Matt Newcomb, managing director at Kevel Ads. Lou Paskalis, founder and chief executive of AJL Partners, moderated the Beet.TV Leadership Session at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
Hunting retail media’s white whale
Dollar General operates more than 21,000 stores. About 75% of Americans live within five miles of one, according to Leonard. Its media network helps brands reach the retailer’s customers, drive sales and build awareness.
The problem was that its onsite and offsite advertising capabilities developed separately. Kevel powers display inventory on Dollar General’s website and app, while The Trade Desk supports campaigns across the open web.
“For the longest time, we were building the measurement on the back end, but all the campaigns are running separate platforms,” Leonard said. “It’s a little bit of the dirty secret of retail media.”
The companies began pursuing what Leonard called their “white whale”: running onsite and offsite campaigns through one platform. Apparently, retail media needed its own Moby-Dick, only with more APIs and fewer harpoons.
“That hasn’t been truly done before,” Leonard said. “And it unlocks a lot of benefits.”
Advertisers can run campaigns through The Trade Desk using the same audience and inventory targeting applied to their open-web buys. Dollar General’s onsite inventory can be included while the retailer maintains control over the customer experience on its properties.
Fantazier said retail data has been underused by advertisers that have concentrated much of their spending on search and other lower-funnel channels.
“There’s a bigger opportunity to look at the data, think about personas, thinking about why somebody is buying and then follow them through their path to conversion,” he said.
Technology meets the company org chart
Uniting the technology does not automatically unite the people using it. Corporate silos have a long history of surviving reorganizations, strategy retreats and PowerPoint slides featuring arrows that point toward “synergy.”
“The technology is absolutely there, but you can’t do it without internal buy-in,” Fantazier said. “The organizational silos are real. They exist.”
The integration is intended to reduce the need for separate teams to coordinate every part of a campaign manually. Data can work together even if the people involved continue sitting in different departments, attending different meetings and guarding different budget lines.
Fantazier cautioned that technology alone cannot overcome every organizational obstacle.
“You need a dose of evolution there as well, or else it’s just going to fail,” he said.
Newcomb described the technology as a force that can pull organizations toward a more unified model. Retail media networks often assembled their advertising systems one product at a time, he said. One vendor handled one format, another managed a different format and the resulting systems rarely spoke to one another.
Moving onto a single technology stack can improve financial and operational efficiency. It also gives retailers more control over a business that may contribute significantly to their profits.
“Giving away control of a part of your P&L makes kind of no sense to me at all,” Newcomb said.
Retail data ventures beyond advertising
The panelists also questioned whether “retail media” is becoming too narrow a description for the information retailers can provide.
Retail purchase data can reveal who is buying, why they are buying and which marketing activity prompted action. Those insights can influence product development, creative work and the broader customer experience.
“I bristle at the term retail media because I think it undersells what’s possible,” Fantazier said. “I like to think about retail data and retail inventory.”
Dollar General’s structure helps connect those functions. Its chief marketing officer oversees enterprise marketing, the media network and its digital experience, Leonard said. The company also uses the same technology stack it offers advertisers to run its own integrated campaigns.
“Our number one advertiser should be our own company,” Leonard said.
The approach gives Dollar General another reason to improve its advertising infrastructure. Better technology can support media revenue while also improving the shopping experience. In other words, the retailer gets to eat its own dog food, although it presumably sells a more appealing selection in aisle seven.
Making cash customers addressable
Dollar General faces an identity challenge that many digitally focused retailers do not. A significant part of its business comes from shoppers who pay in cash, leaving fewer of the electronic signals marketers typically use for targeting and measurement.
The retailer has worked to build an authenticated customer base through its website, app and digital coupon program. That creates a bridge between shopping behavior and media activation, even when a purchase ends with someone handing bills to a cashier.
Fantazier said reliable identity and measurement were nonnegotiable parts of the integration.
“We are reaching real people that are shopping at a Dollar General,” he said. “We understand their behavior. And we can follow them across that path to conversion.”
That authenticated data can help advertisers reach Dollar General shoppers on the retailer’s properties and elsewhere on the open web. It also provides a clearer view of whether a campaign led to a sale.
“Why would you invest your nine-figure budget? Because it’s real. Because the results are real,” Fantazier said.
AI finally enters the conversation
The panel made it nearly 22 minutes before discussing artificial intelligence, an impressive display of restraint at an advertising conference in 2026.
Leonard said Dollar General is investing in AI to improve operations and make its relatively small media team more effective. Fantazier said AI has long been part of The Trade Desk’s platform, where it helps process a volume of advertising activity far beyond human capacity.
“We see 20 million impressions a second, like crazy stats like that,” Fantazier said. “You have to have a really robust layer of intelligence under that to make this work.”
Adding retail data and the path to purchase makes optimization even more complex.
“This is not something a human can optimize,” he said. “So how do we take all of these disparate signals and make sense of it and drive the best outcomes possible for advertisers?”
Kevel is exploring AI from both an operational and governance standpoint. Newcomb said the company wants to improve advertising performance and reduce manual work while ensuring retailers can understand and audit what the technology is doing.
Kevel also created a fictitious retail media network called Food Trove that uses AI agents to build and operate campaigns. The agents communicate with one another about problems such as campaigns that are spending too slowly. This may be welcome news to media buyers who have long dreamed of delegating underpacing conversations to robots.
Retail media prepares for the main stage
The unified model remains a work in progress. Advertisers must change established habits while retailers must integrate advertising technology without disrupting their primary responsibility: helping customers shop and check out.
Fantazier said the value proposition must be simple enough to overcome what he called decades of “infrastructure inertia.”
“It’s the same data. It’s unified measurement. We’re putting it in one place, not two,” he said. “It can’t just be an idea. It has to be actionable.”
Leonard said retail media is reaching a new stage of maturity as technology makes retailer inventory easier for national media buyers to purchase. Better integration can also produce insights and sales measurements that advertisers cannot obtain from conventional media alone.
“We are in the process of leveling up,” Leonard said. “I think we are ready for the main stage.”
That stage may still have multiple Matts, a few stubborn silos and at least one artificial-intelligence agent worried about campaign pacing. But for advertisers tired of hopping between systems, retail media may finally be connecting some of the pieces it has been promising to unite.
You’re watching The Beet.TV Leadership Sessions at Cannes Lions 2026, presented by The Trade Desk. For more videos from this series, please visit this page. You can find all of our coverage from Cannes Lions 2026 here.
CANNES, France – Retail media has spent years promising advertisers a seamless system connecting ads, shoppers and sales. The industry has also spent years handing marketers a collection of platforms, dashboards and passwords that suggest “seamless” may have been used in its loosest possible sense.
Dollar General Media Network is now working with The Trade Desk and Kevel Ads to bring its onsite and offsite advertising into one buying environment. The goal is to let advertisers use the same audiences, inventory controls and measurement as campaigns move between Dollar General’s digital properties and the open web.
Austin Leonard, vice president and general manager of Dollar General Media Network, discussed the effort with Matthew Fantazier, vice president of retail data partnerships at The Trade Desk, and Matt Newcomb, managing director at Kevel Ads. Lou Paskalis, founder and chief executive of AJL Partners, moderated the Beet.TV Leadership Session at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
Hunting retail media’s white whale
Dollar General operates more than 21,000 stores. About 75% of Americans live within five miles of one, according to Leonard. Its media network helps brands reach the retailer’s customers, drive sales and build awareness.
The problem was that its onsite and offsite advertising capabilities developed separately. Kevel powers display inventory on Dollar General’s website and app, while The Trade Desk supports campaigns across the open web.
“For the longest time, we were building the measurement on the back end, but all the campaigns are running separate platforms,” Leonard said. “It’s a little bit of the dirty secret of retail media.”
The companies began pursuing what Leonard called their “white whale”: running onsite and offsite campaigns through one platform. Apparently, retail media needed its own Moby-Dick, only with more APIs and fewer harpoons.
“That hasn’t been truly done before,” Leonard said. “And it unlocks a lot of benefits.”
Advertisers can run campaigns through The Trade Desk using the same audience and inventory targeting applied to their open-web buys. Dollar General’s onsite inventory can be included while the retailer maintains control over the customer experience on its properties.
Fantazier said retail data has been underused by advertisers that have concentrated much of their spending on search and other lower-funnel channels.
“There’s a bigger opportunity to look at the data, think about personas, thinking about why somebody is buying and then follow them through their path to conversion,” he said.
Technology meets the company org chart
Uniting the technology does not automatically unite the people using it. Corporate silos have a long history of surviving reorganizations, strategy retreats and PowerPoint slides featuring arrows that point toward “synergy.”
“The technology is absolutely there, but you can’t do it without internal buy-in,” Fantazier said. “The organizational silos are real. They exist.”
The integration is intended to reduce the need for separate teams to coordinate every part of a campaign manually. Data can work together even if the people involved continue sitting in different departments, attending different meetings and guarding different budget lines.
Fantazier cautioned that technology alone cannot overcome every organizational obstacle.
“You need a dose of evolution there as well, or else it’s just going to fail,” he said.
Newcomb described the technology as a force that can pull organizations toward a more unified model. Retail media networks often assembled their advertising systems one product at a time, he said. One vendor handled one format, another managed a different format and the resulting systems rarely spoke to one another.
Moving onto a single technology stack can improve financial and operational efficiency. It also gives retailers more control over a business that may contribute significantly to their profits.
“Giving away control of a part of your P&L makes kind of no sense to me at all,” Newcomb said.
Retail data ventures beyond advertising
The panelists also questioned whether “retail media” is becoming too narrow a description for the information retailers can provide.
Retail purchase data can reveal who is buying, why they are buying and which marketing activity prompted action. Those insights can influence product development, creative work and the broader customer experience.
“I bristle at the term retail media because I think it undersells what’s possible,” Fantazier said. “I like to think about retail data and retail inventory.”
Dollar General’s structure helps connect those functions. Its chief marketing officer oversees enterprise marketing, the media network and its digital experience, Leonard said. The company also uses the same technology stack it offers advertisers to run its own integrated campaigns.
“Our number one advertiser should be our own company,” Leonard said.
The approach gives Dollar General another reason to improve its advertising infrastructure. Better technology can support media revenue while also improving the shopping experience. In other words, the retailer gets to eat its own dog food, although it presumably sells a more appealing selection in aisle seven.
Making cash customers addressable
Dollar General faces an identity challenge that many digitally focused retailers do not. A significant part of its business comes from shoppers who pay in cash, leaving fewer of the electronic signals marketers typically use for targeting and measurement.
The retailer has worked to build an authenticated customer base through its website, app and digital coupon program. That creates a bridge between shopping behavior and media activation, even when a purchase ends with someone handing bills to a cashier.
Fantazier said reliable identity and measurement were nonnegotiable parts of the integration.
“We are reaching real people that are shopping at a Dollar General,” he said. “We understand their behavior. And we can follow them across that path to conversion.”
That authenticated data can help advertisers reach Dollar General shoppers on the retailer’s properties and elsewhere on the open web. It also provides a clearer view of whether a campaign led to a sale.
“Why would you invest your nine-figure budget? Because it’s real. Because the results are real,” Fantazier said.
AI finally enters the conversation
The panel made it nearly 22 minutes before discussing artificial intelligence, an impressive display of restraint at an advertising conference in 2026.
Leonard said Dollar General is investing in AI to improve operations and make its relatively small media team more effective. Fantazier said AI has long been part of The Trade Desk’s platform, where it helps process a volume of advertising activity far beyond human capacity.
“We see 20 million impressions a second, like crazy stats like that,” Fantazier said. “You have to have a really robust layer of intelligence under that to make this work.”
Adding retail data and the path to purchase makes optimization even more complex.
“This is not something a human can optimize,” he said. “So how do we take all of these disparate signals and make sense of it and drive the best outcomes possible for advertisers?”
Kevel is exploring AI from both an operational and governance standpoint. Newcomb said the company wants to improve advertising performance and reduce manual work while ensuring retailers can understand and audit what the technology is doing.
Kevel also created a fictitious retail media network called Food Trove that uses AI agents to build and operate campaigns. The agents communicate with one another about problems such as campaigns that are spending too slowly. This may be welcome news to media buyers who have long dreamed of delegating underpacing conversations to robots.
Retail media prepares for the main stage
The unified model remains a work in progress. Advertisers must change established habits while retailers must integrate advertising technology without disrupting their primary responsibility: helping customers shop and check out.
Fantazier said the value proposition must be simple enough to overcome what he called decades of “infrastructure inertia.”
“It’s the same data. It’s unified measurement. We’re putting it in one place, not two,” he said. “It can’t just be an idea. It has to be actionable.”
Leonard said retail media is reaching a new stage of maturity as technology makes retailer inventory easier for national media buyers to purchase. Better integration can also produce insights and sales measurements that advertisers cannot obtain from conventional media alone.
“We are in the process of leveling up,” Leonard said. “I think we are ready for the main stage.”
That stage may still have multiple Matts, a few stubborn silos and at least one artificial-intelligence agent worried about campaign pacing. But for advertisers tired of hopping between systems, retail media may finally be connecting some of the pieces it has been promising to unite.
You’re watching The Beet.TV Leadership Sessions at Cannes Lions 2026, presented by The Trade Desk. For more videos from this series, please visit this page. You can find all of our coverage from Cannes Lions 2026 here.
