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10 minutes of expert insights every weekday. Your morning ritual for staying ahead in retail media.
Mirakl Ads Breakfast At Cannes: The commerce crowd leaves before the creativity starts
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[00:00:00] Kiri Masters: The Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity is on paper about the awards, the Lions that are handed out each night of the event to the brands and agencies behind the year's best advertising [00:00:15] campaigns. The week all builds up to the film category on Friday, the headline moment that closes out the festival
[00:00:23] Now, the typical audience for this podcast doesn't usually hang around for that one. By midday on [00:00:30] Thursday, the cabanas and the yachts that are rented out by the ad platforms, the ad tech firms, the retail media players that my listeners work in and around are being broken down.
[00:00:42] You cannot get into them anymore, [00:00:45] and the road back to Nice Airport fills up with commerce media people nursing hangovers and heading home to sleep through the weekend. they leave
[00:00:54] A full day and a half before the brands who came to celebrate creativity get their big finish, [00:01:00] we're out of there. In fact, Creative Commerce, which is the Lion Award named for the thing that all these people actually do, was awarded on Thursday night, June 25th. Most of the commerce media crowd [00:01:15] was on the highway, if not on a plane by then.
[00:01:18] Now, this isn't a new observation. I'm certainly not the first to make it. The brands that post up in the Palais, where the festival programming and the creative showcases [00:01:30] exist, they are quite a world away from the retailers, the vendors, and agencies who are sweating it out up and down the Strip. I wrote about that geography last year, and it hasn't moved much.
[00:01:43] What it does mean [00:01:45] is that a Thursday morning breakfast is the last real window to get our corner of the industry in one room for a debrief before everyone starts to scatter. And so that's what I was able to do yesterday. breakfoost-- I [00:02:00] hosted an invite-only breakfast with Miracle Ads, who sponsored the event and is also the current sponsor of this podcast.
[00:02:08] and I'm gonna do a quick debrief of some of what was on their minds. Let's jump in
[00:02:13]
[00:02:14] Kiri Masters: So [00:02:15] last year the complaint was that the retail media world and the creative world barely occupied the same square mile. This year I went in curious as to whether anything had shifted, and the honest answer from across the room is yes, but [00:02:30] not in the direction that you'd necessarily expect
[00:02:34] Several attendees clocked fewer retailers on the ground than last year, or said that they'd been harder to find at least. One executive from a European e-com [00:02:45] marketplace said that they felt the whole week carried less retail media substance than the year before, that the interesting conversations had migrated to the side events and the breakfasts rather than anywhere on an official stage.
[00:02:58] Another ad tech [00:03:00] veteran who'd been at an official Lions programmed panel the night before noted there wasn't a single retailer in that programming. The print and brand people, yes; the retailers, no. The split is [00:03:15] still very much intact. But then there was one exception that I noticed and I've talked about a couple of times elsewhere which is Dollar General Media Network.
[00:03:25] Dollar General Media Network Headed up by Austin Leonard, brought [00:03:30] its CMO to Cannes
[00:03:31] It was the first year that Dollar General attended Cannes as a media network, and Austin brought his CMO along to see what this whole thing really is. Now, that is a small data [00:03:45] point, really an N of one, but it does point somewhere. Bringing the CMO is a way of telling the broader organization that retail media isn't a side hustle bolted onto the P&L, it's part of how the company shows [00:04:00] up to its brand partners.
[00:04:02] When the media team needs to fund something that'll move the business, whether that is better enterprise plumbing, a deal to get a big advertiser over the line, leadership now understands retail [00:04:15] media well enough to put money behind it. Now, one retailer doing this doesn't close a divide, but it does show a retailer that is treating Cannes as a place to plant a flag
[00:04:28] Now what was new this [00:04:30] time was a sharper conversation about the in-store retail media space and the screens themselves
[00:04:38] Here's the reality. Not every screen is a real media asset. A [00:04:45] retailer can order a pile of displays, bolt them to a wall, and discover that they've built something that brands don't really actually want to appear upon, much less buy on. The wrong brightness, the wrong placement, no thought to whether [00:05:00] the content actually suits the environment and the geography that it is living in in.
[00:05:06] The bar for a screen that a brand will pay to show up on is higher than, "Hey, we've got a screen. Do you want to buy media for it?"
[00:05:14] This [00:05:15] is what context is all about, and context decides the job. ~At the breakfast~
[00:05:19] ~One retailer at the breakfast is wa-- one retailer who was ~one retailer who was at the breakfast is wary of in-store screens precisely because the format, if it did its job too well, would stop shoppers in [00:05:30] their tracks in a store that is really designed around speed and throughput. Versus a pharmacy chain sees it the opposite way.
[00:05:39] People sit and wait in their stores in the pharmacy waiting areas, so a [00:05:45] screen catches genuinely idle attention. Same technology, opposite use case. And that's the thing, there's no portable best practice here, which is a theme that comes up every time in-store is on the table. And of [00:06:00] course, measurement is the recurring sticking point, and the European voices at the event yesterday were the most skeptical.
[00:06:08] Their concern is that an in-store screen often amounts to playing a TV ad to [00:06:15] a crowd that you can't i-identify and you can't necessarily follow to a purchase
[00:06:20] Privacy regulations are different from market to market, and without that link, it's hard to prove that the spend did anything, and still harder in these [00:06:30] markets where privacy rules foreclose the tracking that makes online retail media legible. Now, that measurement gap is part of what made one announcement during the week land.
[00:06:41] Miracle Ads, the sponsor of this event and the [00:06:45] sponsor of this podcast, and Broadsign, Miracle and Broadsign announced a partnership that lets advertisers buy and measure online and in-store ad inventory through one campaign brief, with Miracle [00:07:00] Ads powering the network and Broadsign handling the in-store delivery.
[00:07:04] The integration is slated for Q3, with beta testing now underway. Whether unified buying meaningfully closes the in-store measurement gap is [00:07:15] the open question, but the demand for someone to try is real, and the room really felt it
[00:07:21] But one of the most interesting things from the week wasn't a screen or a stack, it was a piece of content. On [00:07:30] Tuesday, Albertsons Media Collective and Procter & Gamble premiered Rico's Tacos, a short-form scripted micro drama built with the platform Minivela and the production company Brilla Media, and the story is about [00:07:45] a Southern California family trying to start a taco business.
[00:07:49] It runs in one to two-minute episodes through August across Albertsons' YouTube, social, and in-store media channels. What makes it more [00:08:00] than a PR novelty is the order of operations. The shopper insights from Albertsons Media Network shaped the creative at the outset, informing the story, the audience, the brand fit, rather than getting bolted on afterwards to [00:08:15] target and measure a thing that had already been made.
[00:08:18] Now, that is a different use of retail media than what might typically be imagined in the industry. We're used to using first-party data as a targeting and a measurement tool [00:08:30] applied at the end, but here it's a creative input applied at the start. I'll reserve a full review for when I've actually watched the thing.
[00:08:38] I haven't had a chance, even though it's a few days later, because produced branded content really [00:08:45] lives or dies on whether it's any good, and a retail media network producing a scripted series is a long way outside the comfort zone of the sponsored product ad. But it's a real attempt to make retail media creative that isn't frankly the stuff that bores [00:09:00] everyone, and it's the kind of work that needs those better in-store screens from the section above to really land.
[00:09:09] That's content built for the format and not a static ad that is shrunk down to fit [00:09:15] the pixels So where does this leave us? The divide cuts both ways now. Retailers are inching toward the brand world's territory, bringing CMOs, producing real creative content, and treating [00:09:30] Cannes as a stage rather than a sales floor.
[00:09:32] And the brand and creative world keeps backing into commerce, whether it shows up to claim this Lion on Thursday night or not Two different crowds that left last year's festival barely overlapping are [00:09:45] slowly working the same problem from opposite ends.
[00:09:48]