Cannes Lions 2026 Dispatch: Agentic Media Buying, Retail Media Shakeups, and the Future of Creator Commerce

Cannes June 24 podcast === Kiri Masters: Hello, happy Wednesday. I'm coming to you again from Cannes. I'm actually in the PayPal Ads Cafe on the Croisette. And yes, as always, it's a little bit of a whirlwind here.

Something that's been a weird experience for me here is a lot of people that I see and meet have heard that I am moving from the US back to Australia, and I am getting a lot of questions about that. Um, to be honest, it seems like some people are secretly relieved that I'll be leaving the market. Um, and I keep saying, "I'm not dying. I'm just moving halfway across the world, and don't worry, I'm gonna keep- everyone on their toes in the industry Kiri Masters: Before I jump in to my dispatch today, I wanna give a little preview of something I'm gonna be talking about tomorrow.

I sat down with Harvey Ma, who is the head of Sam's Club Connect. Yes, there was a recent rebrand for Sam's Club member access platform, a whole raft of announcements from Walmart in the last few days, an acquisition, a rebrand, a change of strategy and purview for the Sam's Club Media Network And I'll be sharing more on that tomorrow So first up, I wanna share a couple of observations and tidbits that I've heard from brands at Cannes this year First from a CPG who I was speaking with about how they're thinking about agentic media buying And where their priorities are around that.

And they mentioned that they are setting up a data lake. They are early days with that, and they want to use that eventually for ads. But initially at least, this data lake is going to be used for in-store stock tracking. They have people stocking the shelves in the store.

Out of stocks is a big challenge for them. They want to make sure that if they're running ads, they're actually being seen when a product is in stock in the store. So this is sort of this brilliant basics concept where there's all these really interesting use cases for data collaboration and agentic media buying, but really getting the basics right around which products are in stock in a particular store so that we can make sure we're only advertising when someone's able to buy that widget.

That is table stakes that a lot of brands are still working through, including the larger, more sophisticated brands that are showing up in Cannes in 2026. Another major use case of agentic media buying that this brand mentioned is actually bringing to life use of their digital assets in their digital asset management system. Brands, especially large CPGs, have many visual assets that they want to use, that they would like to use, but actually pulling those assets out of their DAM and deploying it across different networks and different campaigns is still quite a manual process, and agentic media buying sort of promises to resolve that issue Next up, I had a really interesting discussion for, um, some content that I'm doing with The Drum at the Albertson's Media Collective Studio and a new partner called Influential and a social media creator.

And as a little sidebar to that conversation, I was speaking with some of the supporting acts for that, um, content about creator content and how it intersects with retail media. This is something that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago 'cause I really wanted to bone up on it And this week, I was able to speak with someone from a talent management agency who works with creators as an intermediary between the retailers who are pulling in creators for campaigns and the creators for themselves.

And this talent management agency was telling me that they're hearing from so many more retailers who want to do big deals with creators. They mentioned Target, Home Depot, Walmart, Amazon, Lowe's, Nordstrom, Albertsons, Kroger, and DoorDash as being some of the top retailers who are investing in a creator network Building something that brands can more easily activate against They're doing fixed fee campaigns. They are also checking out conversion data on creators to actually see who is really performant in the space.

Now, from a technology standpoint, it really runs the gamut. You see retailers like Target aligning with technology and aligning with platforms like LTK to actually capture more influencers and creators that are already part of the LTK network. LTK itself is becoming more of a social platform in and of itself, while other retailers actually have been building their own affiliate programs that are attracting creators And others still are running it more like a managed service type of paid media that brands can tap into.

So this is a really interesting evolving area. I know that there's a lot more questions, um, that I've received on this that I wanna dig into later when I get back from my summer break I will be revisiting it Retailers know that a marketplace model can dramatically boost product assortment, shopper engagement, and total revenue. But to get the most out of your marketplace, you need an ad tech solution that can really engage sellers. Miracle Ads is powering the future of retail media for leading retailers to activate both three P Sellers and one P brands.

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Kiri Masters: And finally I caught the tail end of a really great panel at the CPG Guy's house ~with~ ~Nicole Lozinski from Nestlé, Tony Rogers, the CMO of Dollar General Media Now, uh, ~with Nicole Lozinski from Nestlé, Tony Rogers, the CMO of Dollar General, and Gabby Stola from Big Happy. And the central theme here was the power of creative, rethinking the integrated marketing model. And I'll share a couple of highlights with you One is how Nestlé is focused on delivering the right value proposition to the Dollar General consumer, who skews toward a value-oriented consumer.

And this means that the creative that Nestlé is deploying needs to be geographically and demographically precise. It can't be evergreen or one size fits all. What type of ad creative is deployed in the stores, online, and what Dollar General is able to do with their huge network of stores, twenty-one thousand stores In communities around America that can be quite small. And that creates both a challenge and an opportunity.

The opportunity is hyper-local targeting and hyper-specific messaging And one way that Nestle is able to tap into this opportunity is with local inventory ads, specific Nestle products that are available at the nearest Dollar General And what Big Happy does as a technology partner is ingests Dollar General data to serve localized ads at a personal level that improves relevance and purchase intent Big Happy launched DCO or Dynamic Creative Optimization for 3D digital out of home shortly before Cannes, and they describe this situation where 3D digital out of home has been expensive and time-consuming for the longest time.

But Big Happy's tech streamlines the process of rendering creative to each media owner's specs without compromising on quality. And so what this means is enabling dynamic creative to a SKU level relevance per location, having timing triggers, like showing value messaging at the end of the month, distance to the nearest store, things like QR codes that can be integrated into digital formats that link out to places like Google Maps and giving directions, or product detail pages or sampling opportunities via third-party fulfillment.

So this is innovation coming from a kind of surprising place, a value retailer and a multinational brand working together with this vendor to deliver digital out of home at scale, but also in a hyper-targeted way. That's a lot of surprising things all thrown together, and I think this is what makes this kind of event so interesting is these new ideas that are not yet mainstream, not yet really in the capability of a lot of media buyers But really a preview of what might be to come.

So speaking of previews, I've gotta get to my next session. I'm gonna be sharing more interviews and behind the scenes before the end of the week, including a discussion with Harvey Marr at Sam's Club and a recap of the breakfast that I'm doing with Miracle Ads on Thursday morning.