Retail Media is now part of the modern retail and brand landscape. RMNs have become a significant revenue driver for retailers. 
Retailers are extending advertising opportunities onsite, offsite and in-store while adding more self-service and measurement capabilities 

All this makes 2025 an important inflection point for retail media, as both brands and retailers are tasked with proving that they have built a solid model that can continue to deliver growth.  This opening panel will bring real perspectives from both the brand side and retail side of retail media who will tell us how to build the next era of retail media. 

The 2026 Retail Media Report marks the shift in retail media from its initial startup phase to a period where it must scale and deliver on its promise. Rising expectations now require proving brand growth, building specialist teams, and refining operating models. This includes managing the rise of agentic commerce and using AI to both automate processes and create genuine commercial value.
The panel will address the reality of this new landscape and examine what European brands, retailers, and technology firms must build now to remain competitive.

Brands are becoming more selective about where they commit their spend. RMNs must clearly define their role and positioning, We discuss the practicalities of identifying your network’s competitive edge and how to communicate that value to brands advertisers.

• Using data and insights to inform creative decisions without reducing creativity
• Exploring how creativity is influencing the customer journey - conversion, incrementality and loyalty

This session looks at how retailers use first-party data improve the shopper experience, strengthen loyalty, increase lifetime value, and improve decisions across trading, marketing and product. And it tackles the trade-offs of how to grow retail media revenue without more ad load or a poorer shopping experience.

Everyone in retail media talks about data — but having data isn’t the same as using the right data, in the right way. This session explores why identity must come first, how to separate good data from bad, and what’s really required to show measurement and incrementality.

Commerce Media Networks are the ‘new kids on the block’ in media. Find out what they offer and what they can deliver, including transparency, measurement, creative, AI-driven decisioning, and integration with broader media plans.

Our closing keynote panel brings together global retail media pioneers to challenge how the industry thinks about its next chapter. Drawing on lessons from leading markets across Europe, the discussion will explore how retail media is evolving into a broader commerce media ecosystem — and what different approaches reveal about scale and value creation. Looking ahead, the panel will examine how AI will reshape planning, personalisation and measurement, and ask a bigger question: what role should retail media play in the future of advertising, commerce and growth?

The session will explore how AI-powered optimisation helped unlock the value of first-party data, improve ad relevance for shoppers, and significantly increase return on ad spend for brands.

As retail media partnerships continue to evolve,  data collaboration has become both more valuable — and more complex. This session explores This session explores how data clean rooms can optimised beyond safe data sharing, to unlock smarter targeting, better measurement and incremental growth across retail and media environments

• Removing silos to avoid fragmented planning and duplication of effort and spend
• Integrating planning cycles, investment and measurement to drive growth across connected commerce

1st party shopper data is one of the most powerful assets in retail media. But how does it drive growth? With fragments customer  journeys, multiple touchpoints and competing attribution models, proving impact from insight has become more complex than ever. This session tackles the practical reality of turning insight into action by connecting behaviour, intent and context signals to smarter audience activation. We will also explore how brands and retailers collaborate on share insights and planning to deliver impact.

We'll unpack how first-party data can be used to move retail media from fragmented activation to a more connected, performance-driven approach, exploring how it drives more relevant targeting, stronger performance and measurable incrementality at scale

Instead of talking about measurement, this panel will get into the detail of what to do and how to do from both the brand and retailer perspective. It will bypass the usual bland conversation to talk about measurement in the context of sophisticated commercial partnership.

In this fireside chat, Colin Lewis is joined by Ines Catão, Retail Media Director at Worten, for an in-depth conversation about building a marketplace-powered retail media business in an emerging market. Ines will share how Worten, Portugal’s leading electronics retailer with more than 35% market share and over 200 stores, transformed its online marketplace into a high-growth advertising platform, delivering 300% monetisation growth and more than 800% ROAS in just seven months. The discussion will explore how Worten evolved from a traditional retail model toward a more sophisticated media business, while creating differentiated propositions for both major brands and SMB sellers. It will also examine the role of marketplace democratisation, operational scale, automation, and cross-functional alignment in making that growth possible. Looking ahead, the session will focus on how Worten is connecting online and in-store retail media and building a model designed to scale profitably into 2026 and beyond

In this session, Christian Skaarud shares Coop Norge’s journey of launching a retail media network from the ground up. From deploying in-store screens to using sensor technology to capture real-world impressions, Christian will explore how they have built a measurable and scalable proposition.

The session will also examine how loyalty data sits at the heart of their strategy, powering audience targeting, enriching campaign insights, and enabling closed-loop measurement.

AI agents are beginning to shop, search and make decisions on behalf of consumers, ushering in the era of agentic commerce. This panel cuts through the hype to explore what agentic commerce really means for retail media today. We’ll unpack the technologies, data and capabilities businesses need to become “agent-ready”, examine the growing influence of major platforms, and discuss how brands and retailers can maintain customer trust as AI plays a bigger role in purchasing decisions.

Explore how AI-driven decisioning is connecting retail media across the funnel, optimising relevance and performance across digital and physical touchpoints

Retail Media is onsite, offsite and instore, and based on a platform of targeting and first party data.  How can you find partners that really understand each part of retail media and how it fits together? This session examines what brands and retailers should look for in technology and agency partners to deliver on their objectives.

The Seven Challenges for Retail Media are an annual report written by Colin that are based on his insights and ideas coming from working with brands and retailers around the world. The Seven Challenges are normally released in Q1, but Colin is releasing them at Retail Media X as an exclusive for this audience.  These challenges are ideas with nuance that are meant to be both thought provoking and help you stay ahead of the curve.