One question followed us up and down the Croisette this year. Here's how we answered it — with two major announcements, a week of conversations with the industry's sharpest minds and a clear picture of where retail media goes next.
What does commerce media look like when AI is doing the shopping?
That was the question hanging over the 73rd Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity — and it's the question we came prepared to answer. Retail media has officially graduated from side project to center stage. Retailers brought their CMOs. Brands brought their toughest questions. And everyone, from agencies to ad tech to the retailers themselves, was asking how AI, agentic commerce and omnichannel convergence reshape the playbook.
For the third year running, Mirakl Ads showed up in force. Here's everything we announced, shared and learned at Cannes Lions 2026.
The announcements: from dashboards to execution
Business Agents turn every user into a retail media expert
Retail media's biggest bottleneck isn't demand — it's expertise. Advertisers need to manage campaigns, adjust bids and spot growth opportunities daily. Retailers need to set floor prices, prioritize new ad formats and find untapped demand. Few teams have the time or in-house resources to do it all well.
That's why we launched Business Agents (opens in a new tab), a conversational AI expert advisor embedded directly within the Mirakl Ads platform. Through a simple, guided conversation, any user — regardless of technical knowledge — can run more precise optimizations and make faster, better-informed decisions.
Business Agents work on both sides of the retail media equation, a first in the ad tech industry:
- For advertisers: budget allocation, product prioritization and bid management to get the most out of every campaign
- For retailers: floor price optimization, ad inventory expansion, fill rate analysis and keyword gap identification to maximize the value of every media asset
Every recommendation follows a "recommend and confirm" model. The agent presents the expected impact, asks for explicit approval and then applies the change directly in the platform — AI speed with full human oversight.
"We're not building a chatbot. We're putting a retail media expert into the hands of every advertiser and retailer... This is the shift from dashboards to execution." — Octavie Gosselin, VP of Mirakl Ads
Business Agents will be generally available on Mirakl Ads in the second half of 2026.
Mirakl Ads x Broadsign: The full shopper journey, finally connected
Shoppers discover online, but the vast majority of purchasing decisions still happen in store. So why do retail media campaigns still treat those worlds as separate channels?
At Cannes Lions, we announced a strategic partnership with Broadsign (opens in a new tab), the leading global platform for managing and monetizing out-of-home media. Together, we're bridging the gap between eCommerce placements and in-store digital screens — so retailers can offer advertisers one campaign brief, one buying experience and one consolidated view of performance across the entire shopper journey.
For retailers, the partnership opens a new path to monetizing physical in-store assets alongside existing online inventory, all while retaining full ownership of their data, shopper experience and pricing decisions. For brands, it means less fragmentation and more impact, with every dollar measured, compared and optimized across channels.
The integration is anticipated to launch in Q3, with beta testing already underway.
The trends that defined retail media at Cannes Lions
Between the panels, roundtables and our Mirakl Moments interview series with Colin Lewis, a few themes kept surfacing. Consider them your cheat sheet for where the industry is headed.
The great convergence is here. Onsite, offsite and in-store are collapsing into a single, unified buying experience — and the industry has been waiting for it. Our Broadsign partnership was cited throughout the week as a signal of what's next: buy the in-store screen the same way you buy the sponsored placement.
Creativity is roaring back. After years of performance-first thinking, creativity dominated conversations from brands, retailers and tech companies alike. As retail media moves from pure performance into brand-building — think creator-led content and even retailer-produced entertainment — creative excellence becomes the factor that separates winning networks from the rest.
Retail media has a seat at the enterprise table. Retailers didn't just send their retail media leads to Cannes Lions this year. They brought CMOs, merchants and finance leaders — a clear signal that retail media is no longer a side project but a core part of go-to-market strategy. And as Anne Hallock, VP of Mirakl Ads AMER, unpacked at ADWEEK House, the most mature networks are proving they can do more than generate ad revenue: applied off-site, those dollars actively lower customer acquisition costs for the entire organization.
You're not just targeting humans anymore. Our CMO Darius Meadon put it plainly: marketplaces and agentic commerce are two sides of the same coin. LLMs don't care about banner aesthetics — they reward rich, structured, intent-based product data and penalize things like out-of-stocks. The takeaway for brands? Invest in the "boring bits" of data infrastructure now, because contextual catalog data is what determines whether AI recommends your product or skips right past it.
That last trend isn't hypothetical. Seventy percent of shoppers now pass through an LLM before arriving on a retailer's site, and LLM-driven traffic grew 400% year over year in Q1 2026. Our own analysis shows that operating a marketplace increases a retailer's LLM mention rate by 25% — more assortment and better data mean more discoverability in the AI era.
Where you could find us
If you were at Cannes Lions, chances are you crossed paths with Mirakl Ads:
- Brand Innovators Showcase Stage — Darius Meadon moderated a panel on retail media as the third wave of digital advertising, alongside leaders from DICK'S Media Exchange, Marriott International's Riott Media and Instacart
- ADWEEK House — Anne Hallock joined ADWEEK to unpack what separates the retailers moving forward from those falling behind
- Retail Media Age Roundtable — Simon White joined senior retail media leaders for an off-the-record conversation on measurement, standardization and where the industry goes from here
- Beau Parfum et Déjeuner with The Drum — an intimate afternoon with the women leading commerce media through its next chapter
- Retail Media Breakfast Club — Kiri Masters hosted an honest, senior conversation on what's working, what's shifting and the decisions shaping retail media's future
- FMCG Guys podcast — Octavie Gosselin sat down live in Cannes to talk marketplace monetization, algorithm performance and why the biggest threat with AI is not seizing it
- Mirakl Moments — Colin Lewis interviewed our leaders all week on agentic commerce, the Broadsign partnership, Business Agents and more
The conversation doesn't end on the Croisette
Cannes Lions made one thing clear: the retailers winning in retail media are the ones connecting the dots — between online and in-store, between performance and brand, between human shoppers and the AI agents increasingly shopping on their behalf.
That's exactly the future we're building. If we met at Cannes, we'd love to continue the conversation. And if we missed each other on the Croisette, there's no need to wait until next year.
Let's talk (opens in a new tab) about what a smarter, more connected retail media strategy looks like for your business.
