During a panel at Shoptalk Europe titled "Think Like an Agency, Grow Like a Retailer," leaders from three major retail media players—Unlimitail (a Carrefour-Publicis joint venture), Douglas Marketing Solutions (a Douglas Group subsidiary), and Nectar360 (owned by Sainsbury's)—explored how the industry is maturing beyond simple ad inventory sales (RetailNews.ai). Each operates under a different corporate structure but converges on the same insight: the next generation of retail media will be defined by stronger collaboration, sophisticated data capabilities, and AI-powered personalization (RetailNews.ai).
Nectar360 unveiled Pollen, an AI-powered retail media platform designed to unify in-store, onsite, and offsite environments within a single technology and data stack (RetailNews.ai). The platform dramatically accelerates manual work—building customer audiences from campaign briefs now takes seconds instead of days, and creative resizing across formats takes 90 seconds instead of three weeks (RetailNews.ai). Early multi-touch attribution data from Pollen confirmed that campaigns spanning in-store, onsite, and offsite channels generate a genuine multiplier effect compared with single-channel campaigns running alone (RetailNews.ai).
All three executives emphasized that hiring for agency mindset and collaborative culture matters as much as technical capability, and that data quality—not ad technology alone—is the true competitive lever. As retail media matures, success increasingly depends on combining AI, customer intelligence, and cross-functional collaboration into a unified growth platform that retailers can position as a strategic capability rather than a siloed marketing channel (RetailNews.ai).