Cannes Lions 2025 has begun and is shaping up to be the biggest ever, with more than 15,000 creative and business professionals from 97 countries expected to attend keynote presentations, expert panels and a host of professional and social mixers.
As ever, Cannes is among the year’s most highly anticipated multimedia gatherings where brand executives, agency leaders, content creators, and media and technology mavens will network, unveil initiatives and collaborations, and forge new partnerships against the glamourous backdrop of the Croisette.
What topics will be on the lips of attendees from the retail media sphere? It’s a time of vibrant transformation in omnichannel advertising, and we asked Sarah Marzano, Principal Analyst at subscription-based market research firm EMARKETER, to share what’s on her radar, as well as her insights into the latest trends shaking up retail media and commerce.
Marzano also gives us a sneak preview of a panel that is sure to get movers and shakers talking, one that she herself is moderating: STRATACACHE’s VIP Retail Media Measurement Breakfast on Wednesday, June 18, where brand leaders and industry experts will dive deep into the current state of in-store advertising measurement and analytics.
At Cannes, you’re moderating the STRATACACHE Retail Media Measurement Breakfast. What questions about in-store data measurement are you planning to explore?
Compared to digital, the challenge for in-store is that we don’t have as much opportunity to draw a clear line of attribution between an ad impression and a product getting added to a cart and converted on. There’s so much potential for physical stores to act as full funnel campaign environments, but the measurement piece is quite complex.
I’m really excited for the STRATACACHE event because we’re going to get to hear firsthand from folks who are embedded in the retailer organizations and thinking through how to make in-store retail media work within their vast footprints, as well as some of the folks who have great insight into how the technology is evolving to enable more precise measurement. Historically it’s been a foregone conclusion that the store was a black box and we weren’t going to get granular data, but all of that is changing so quickly.
In terms of broader trends that will be front of mind at Cannes, what about customer experience? How is retail media transforming physical shopping experiences?
That’s a really fascinating topic. Inherently you’re more likely to hear customers have a knee-jerk reaction around ads: “I don’t like ads. I don’t want to see them.” But we have data showing that one of the environments where customers are the most receptive to seeing ads is actually retailers’ websites, and we’re seeing that the technology underpinning those experiences on retailers’ websites is improving.
Hopefully you’re seeing contextually relevant ads that help you get to what you’re looking for faster or help you discover something you didn’t know you were looking for. That gets really important as well when we think about reinventing the physical experience of shopping in-store. We have to consider the traditional shopper marketing tactics that are in place and where new media formats are complimentary or actually additive and not causing disruption to someone’s journey in-store.
As we’re seeing the shopping experience become more fragmented, how are brands deciding where to place their media investment? Where do retailers fit into that decision-making process?
A challenge that a lot of retailers are encountering is how do we knit together our internal stakeholders to make sure that things like merchandising category management and media are all moving in sync again to enhance customer experience, but also move product in a way that’s efficient and profitable. There is really a lot of power in the hands of the advertisers now to choose who they work with based on who is able to deliver a cohesive strategy that is going to align with supporting that brand’s holistic goals.
That puts the onus on retailers to step it up in terms of addressing the fact that advertisers have been quite outspoken about where they are experiencing friction and the resources it takes for them to take on another media network. Until that happens, advertisers are going to have to pick and choose where they show up. Media budgets haven’t substantially grown, so it’s a case of retailers making the case for where it’s best to allocate that spend and to the results that advertisers are getting from it.
What else are you expecting or excited to explore at this year’s Cannes? What conversations are you looking forward to having?
It’s my first time there, but I’m well aware that last year at Cannes, we saw the emergence of non-retail verticals in the space that had launched a few months prior. They were coming in and saying, “Here we are and here’s what we can do.” I’m excited to see how players in financial media and travel media are iterating now that they’ve been in the market for a bit of time, and looking for any kind of exciting partnership tie-ups when you have all these differentiated players that together could do cool things to knit together the fragmented traveler journey. And I know it’ll be fresh on everyone’s minds after they get off the long flight and then take multiple Ubers to get to the conference.
