Retail Media At A Crossroads: Insights From Cannes Lions With Drew Cashmore

[00:00:00] Tessa Burg: Alright, well welcome to another episode of Leader Generation, brought to you by Mod Op. I’m your host, Tessa Burg, and today I am joined by Drew Cashmore. He’s the Chief Strategy Officer at Vantage, and we’re very excited to have him because we’re gonna be exploring the top trends happening in retail and commerce media.

[00:00:20] Tessa Burg: He’s the perfect guest ’cause he’s coming back to us from Cannes Lions Festival where this was a central topic. Drew, thanks so much for joining us on the podcast.

[00:00:32] Drew Cashmore: Thanks for having me. I’m excited.

[00:00:34] Tessa Burg: I almost didn’t take a breath there.

[00:00:38] Drew Cashmore: I apologize. It’s really good

[00:00:40] Tessa Burg: Feeling Drew. Uh, so, uh, as we were talking about before we got on the line or started recording, I have never been to  Cannes Lions , so we would love to learn more about you, but after you tell us about your background and your role at Vantage, tell us a little bit about set the scene.

[00:01:00] Tessa Burg: What was it like at Cannes Lions? Uh, this year where retail and media were super hot.

[00:01:06] Drew Cashmore: So if you haven’t been there broadly, let me set the stage. It’s a, it’s a long beach, uh, and a European town, and it’s turned into this giant advertising party for one week. Um, and so you have, uh, restaurants and tents built and, uh, just thousands and thousands of people walking the street in a perpetual conversation about advertising and media and retail media, and you’re, you’re in this never-ending state of motion. So you’ll do a meeting and then you’ll move to another place in, in really hot weather and another place and, and, uh, it’s just a really exciting energizing time. And I think with that, one of the things that I love about Canne specifically is that people are in a more focused and better mood than any conference you’ve ever been to, than any meeting that you have over Zoom or in person.

[00:02:02] Drew Cashmore: And so it’s one of those places that real decisions get made, uh, in spite of what it looks like is just a singular giant party. Real decisions are getting made, people are excited to move forward on, on projects that they’ve been maybe sitting on for, for a long time. Um, and so it’s a, just a phenomenal place to be.

[00:02:23] Tessa Burg: Oh, that sounds awesome. Uh.

[00:02:26] Drew Cashmore: Um, get into retail media. I’ll get into my background. Where do you wanna lead from here?

[00:02:31] Tessa Burg: Yes. Well, let’s, let’s go ahead and get into your background since you are, you have been for a while, one of the leaders in this space.

[00:02:40] Drew Cashmore: Thanks for saying that. Uh, so I, I’ve been in retail media for a long time or or shopper marketing before that, but I was hired by Walmart in 2009 to build a small advertising business to offset the cost of e-commerce.

[00:02:53] Drew Cashmore: And so we were building out, um, this was specifically in Canada. We were building out the e-commerce platform. And we couldn’t self or we couldn’t fund it. And so we self-funded it through the sale of advertising, scaled that business to be the largest at the time, retail media business in the Canadian market.

[00:03:11] Drew Cashmore: And then in 2017 I was asked to move to, uh, San Francisco with the US retail media team to kind of figure out what we would do there. And so I was one of four people that would bring to life what is now Walmart Connect. Um, and we, we did everything from insourcing the business, changing the relationship of the business with, uh, 5,000 merchants at the time, um, creating a pretty sophisticated architecture that would connect advertisers and, and customers, uh, into a singular tools, um, and, and scaled that to what is now a four and a half billion dollar retail media business.

[00:03:51] Drew Cashmore: Um, from that point I’ve worked, uh, with retailers around the world on their retail media strategies. And I, and I’ll say that one of the things that seems to be true across the world is that the playbook that we built at Walmart is relatively consistent with where the rest of the market is going now, 6, 7, 8 years later.

[00:04:11] Drew Cashmore: Um, and so it’s a very repeatable thing that, uh, luckily I have a slight crystal ball into what the future of this space is gonna look like.

[00:04:20] Tessa Burg: That is exciting. So tell us a little bit, what trends did you see at Cannes Lions that maybe you’ve seen before or that retail media is now just catching onto?

[00:04:34] Drew Cashmore: So one of the.

[00:04:36] Drew Cashmore: There’s a convergence. This is an event that has, uh, comes from a traditional media space and, and you know, over time it’s moved into digital and over time it’s moved into connected TV and and so on. But at its core, it is a media advertising event. I. Now when you’re introducing retail media into that space, it, it certainly takes a new lens, but you’re really seeing the convergence of what I’d call traditional digital media and retail media.

[00:05:04] Drew Cashmore: And so what looks like, um, a significant ramp up of conversations around retail media are just, from my perspective, more traditional media businesses kind of evolving to wrap their arms around. This net new bucket of dollars or this, this landscape that might be, uh, particularly, particularly threatening to them.

[00:05:25] Drew Cashmore: Um, so it’s not, I, I’d say that, you know, there’s, there’s a lot of conversations around me, retail media that have, that came up in Cannes a lot more than I’ve frankly ever seen before. Um, but it’s, it’s ba you’re seeing now this. Uh, world where there’s a lot more retailers in the conversation and there’s a lot more retailers.

[00:05:47] Drew Cashmore: It can, and there are a lot of, um, digital media businesses, the Metas and Reddits and, and Googles of this world that are, are trying to figure out how do we all play together in the same sandbox.

[00:06:00] Tessa Burg: Yeah, that’s interesting. So when I was at American Greetings. I was always fascinated by the fact we invested so much internally to create cards and we had physical cards and we had digital cards, and we also monetized through media, which really was a large part of the revenue, was the advertising that occurred on the sites, not the assets themselves, but this is kind of back in the day.

[00:06:29] Tessa Burg: So this is like 2006, 2007, and at the time. It was pretty separate. You know, like there was digital and the media happening over here and everything was quite siloed. But the ones that seemed to work the best, the campaigns where both the brand got the most value and us and our consumer is when we would bring those experiences together.

[00:06:56] Tessa Burg: Are you seeing a different approach now in 2025 compared to. You know, when you, when I was at a 2006, a 2009 approach to digital media, are you seeing more collaboration and is the media itself and the opportunities that brands have to build sort of like more immersive, better relationships through those touch points, have they evolved and what’s driving those evolution?

[00:07:22] Drew Cashmore: I don’t see. The industry isn’t playing out exactly like that. Uh, there’s certainly collaboration happening at a, a macro level. There’s collaboration happening between retailer and partner X or retailer and publisher X. Um, but it’s not coming together cleanly yet. And, and I think that’s probably one of my core themes from Cannes, is that.

[00:07:45] Drew Cashmore: We’re building a very disjointed ecosystem, um, and that you’ve got a lot of noise and a lot of, uh, singular solutions or point solutions that are driving the overall strategy of our landscape. That are then not cleanly piecing together with the propositions that are already built. Um, and so we’re still early days in this space, and it’s not to say that it won’t fundamentally evolve even over the next six months to a year.

[00:08:14] Drew Cashmore: Um, but I think. That the, the cleanliness that you described or the ease of buying or the ease of, of, um, reaching a consumer across multiple touchpoint doesn’t effectively exist yet in our space. And I think the trend that I saw in the last week is that it’s not actually coming together. That it’s splintering further apart and it needs that connective tissue.

[00:08:39] Tessa Burg: Hmm. That- now I really wish I would’ve been at Cannes. This is-

[00:08:44] Drew Cashmore: A lot of work to be done.

[00:08:46] Tessa Burg: Yes. Well, and if the weather’s good, and I heard there’s a lot of boats, you know.

[00:08:50] Drew Cashmore: Got a great tan.

[00:08:52] Tessa Burg: Would’ve enjoyed it. So one of the other topics, you know, related to retail media that was very popular, and we talk about creating more cohesive experience is first party data.

[00:09:02] Tessa Burg: And the advantage that brands have to make more use of first party data and that retail and commerce media companies can bring value with access to their first party data. Tell us a little bit about how that is evolving the landscape. What opportunities is it creating, especially as privacy changes and other targeting methods are emerging?

[00:09:27] Drew Cashmore: This topic for me isn’t as exciting as I think it is for others related to retail media, just because I think it misses one of the core foundational points of what needs to happen in our space. That is you need to be as a brand present. In the retail spaces that you’re selling it. And, and so our space has evolved because of the prevalence of retail or first party data and the access to it and, um, the, uh, the potential deterministic audiences that you can create, create out of that.

[00:10:03] Drew Cashmore: But because every retailer is doing it differently because these tools aren’t connected, because, um, we have a, a varying level of understanding of what and how to use first party data in our space. Um, you’re getting a very disjointed approach to first party data on the whole, and you can kind of hear the theme that I’m pulling through every story I’m telling.

[00:10:29] Drew Cashmore: We built this really fragmented data architecture and ecosystem related to retail media, and as a result, it’s not maybe being used as effectively as possible. But going back to my original point, the what is true in our space is that if you are a brand that is selling at a retailer and you are not present.

[00:10:49] Drew Cashmore: Then it is likely that your competitor is, you spend tens, hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising to get people to buy your product. And when they’re reaching for the product shelf, you’re nowhere to be found. And so, as a bare minimum, um, effort in retail media and shopper marketing, you need to be where your customer is.

[00:11:10] Drew Cashmore: And then when you move forward and, and you get to a level of, of greater sophistication, you get better at using deterministic data to reach consumers and, and retailers figuring out what, you know, return. You can get off of this from an incremental standpoint, but bare minimum is be present when it matters.

[00:11:28] Tessa Burg: Yeah. I feel like this reminds me of why you bid on your own brand in paid search. Yes. A lot of times, especially when people are moving quickly, you know, they search for your brand and if they see a competitor, then they’ll, that serves as an opportunity to have a little bit of leakage and attention.

[00:11:51] Tessa Burg: Like now they wanna compare. So if I, if I follow your advice and I decide that my brand should be present on the shelf, what works? Like what? What presence is effective versus what kind of presence maybe provides the shopper with less value.

[00:12:11] Drew Cashmore: As it relates to e-commerce, search is obviously the most important and you see budgets in the realm of 70% of total retail media spends landing in search. So for retailers that have e-commerce presence, uh, at, at relative scale search is, and product listing ads are by far the most important place to be.

[00:12:32] Drew Cashmore: Um, and frankly, when, when a consumer is. Searching out a particular product or when they’re looking through a shelf, being promoted in that space is incredibly important. So that, that as a foundational element is, is is there. Um, I think the other piece that we’re still trying to figure out and that is gonna have to is, is being worked on now and was definitely a core theme of, of can is, is instore.

[00:12:59] Drew Cashmore: Um, and there’s a lot more we can talk about, but in Instore, but if. 80, 90% of all retail sales are happening in store right now, and a fraction of the total retail media spends are happening in store. There’s a huge untapped opportunity there overall.

[00:13:17] Tessa Burg: Yeah. So let’s talk about in-store media, ’cause that not only was a big trend at Canne, but that’s a topic that keeps reoccurring on the podcast and it’s fairly new for a lot of marketers and I, I’m not sure they.

[00:13:33] Tessa Burg: But one of the quotes that we pulled from the can headlines is in-store is the next frontier. And I’m not sure everyone is feeling that it’s that big of an opportunity, like what is driving the scope of what in-store can do for that shopping experience?

[00:13:52] Drew Cashmore: I have a lot of different places I could go. So, so for, for reference, uh, one of my roles at Walmart, um, when we had reached a certain threshold of revenue on the website.

[00:14:02] Drew Cashmore: There was a, a, a strategic effort that we undertook to figure out how to scale the store’s business because we knew that there was a peak at which, or a cap at which we could make revenue on the site at the time, um, just based on traffic patterns and so on. I don’t wanna comment that that’s necessarily true anymore, but that was at the time.

[00:14:21] Drew Cashmore: And so, um, I put up my hand and said, Hey, can I figure out and run the store’s business? And, and so that became a, a pretty substantial opportunity to. Potentially double our overall revenue at the time. And what was fascinating about that overall experience and, and what I learned from it was that that ecosystem exists already.

[00:14:44] Drew Cashmore: So if I use Walmart as an example, 60, 70 years ago when Walmart was founded, one of the first efforts they undertook was shopper marketing at a store level. And they created events and sampling and demos and signage. Uh, related to brands that would help not sell Walmart, but sell the brands that they carried overall, that is now true for all of retail.

[00:15:08] Drew Cashmore: So when you walk down the aisles in any given retailer, you see digital screens. You see, um. Physical signage. You see events, you see demo samples, you see, uh, uh, product p PDQs or um, physical shelf, uh, labels that are built by brands to promote their products. That’s not classified as retail media today, but it is retail media.

[00:15:32] Drew Cashmore: It’s advertising at point of purchase. And so when we undertook this effort, the realization at that time was. Not how do I build net new within the stores and, you know, create a brand new digital in-store network or create a brand new, uh, radio platform. It was about how do I effectively operationalize that which already exists and make a little money off of that.

[00:16:02] Tessa Burg: I love that take, and that’s feels very true for a lot of these trends is starting with, you know, where do you make the most? Of the infrastructure that exists while looking at where you can reduce friction and increase value for the brands that you serve and the customer, because I feel like the best in-store retail media, whether digital or physical peaks interest gets your attention, makes you cur curious about, you know, what’s happening or, or what’s new about this brand.

[00:16:37] Drew Cashmore: You, you know, let me push this back on you. So this is coming up a lot in your world as well, and, and you and I talked before about how in-store is, is, uh, prevalent in a lot of the conversations you’re having. What are you hearing? What are you excited about?

[00:16:53] Tessa Burg: I think I’m excited for, brands become more aware that they’re part of the, of the purchase at the moment it’s happening. So I’ll give the example back to when I worked at American Greetings. A part of our key manager training was actually going into the retail stores themselves and really understanding the layout, the planning, the importance of end caps, and observing how people navigated the stores even when they were going against.

[00:17:23] Tessa Burg: Like Target or Walgreens or CVS’s intentional layout and we, why, how do we make those investment decisions? How do we use the data that we get to think about the movement of the inventory and where do we have those opportunities to? I always said like Spark Joy. There was this like organizational book at the time that I think was like a similar phrase and it was all about like decluttering and when you-

[00:17:50] Tessa Burg: It’s funny to think about. I’m adding in something, I’m adding in an end cap. I’m adding in a message on a digital board at a time when someone has their attention. But how do you sort of create that space in the moment so you resonate with the right audience, with the right person? So what I’m, I think that it is, or at least from my past experience, it was largely underutilized.

[00:18:17] Tessa Burg: But I do think they’re as. Especially stinking digital media becomes so loud and crowded, and social media feels like it’s loud and crowded, that you can create like a connection point with someone in a moment, uh, is what I think is most exciting.

[00:18:36] Drew Cashmore: That’s a really good point. You, you move into a much more experiential effort, um, that enhances not only the shopping experience, but helps sell more product.

[00:18:47] Drew Cashmore: And I think the, the thing you said there. On the store walks is one of the most important pieces of this is there’s a lot of people that have entered the retail media space that come from more traditional media backgrounds and it’s, it’s hard to understand all of the random nuances that happen in a store and, and I think I would maybe challenge anyone in the retail media space to make sure you’re doing frequent store walks to understand what that experience is like, and.

[00:19:17] Drew Cashmore: And kind of live the culture of the retailer because it’s, uh, it’s, it’s so different than the media world that, that we live in and, and the parties at Cannes.

[00:19:27] Tessa Burg: Yes. Yeah. And especially for when people do that, the checkout process, like when you start to think of that as a critical moment where you might have the opportunity to remove friction, it’s, it’s changing.

[00:19:44] Tessa Burg: You know, or, and, and when you think of it more as remove friction and not a, like add to cart, when you remove friction, you can add to cart. You know, everyone talks about like how much is in that cart. So that was another really powerful thing is look at the, the whole store. But man, I have so much respect for people who work in retail.

[00:20:06] Tessa Burg: Yeah, it’s crazy. It made my, uh, Camelot Music Days back at the Mentor Mall. Looked pretty tame. Although our holidays were outta control, we were pushing those blank cassette tapes. Uh, so let’s, let’s keep going ’cause this is really interesting and I love making this tie back to the experiences you had at Walmart Connect and what’s playing out.

[00:20:29] Tessa Burg: Um, what are, there were, I felt like there was a lot of headlines coming out about these big technology partnerships that we’re having. And one of the themes that you have been hitting on is that actually things are disjointed. What technology partnerships have to happen, either they did or, or you hope to see more of, or maybe it’s not tech partnerships, what has to come together so that we have a more collaborative and connected network and platform to operate from?

[00:21:04] Drew Cashmore: So if, if we back it out to what needs to happen in the space overall. We need to make it easier and more appealing for advertisers to buy, and we need to make it easier and more efficient for retailers to operate. And those two foundational components are what I think are going to allow rest of market to accelerate.

[00:21:25] Drew Cashmore: Um, and by the way, when I say rest of market, it’s anyone below Amazon and Walmart. There is a significant amount of retail media investment happening at the top, and then the rest is splitting, um, about 15% of the total ecosystem of the total investment. So, um, there’s a lot more work we need to do to become competitive with the top.

[00:21:47] Drew Cashmore: If I think about the things that need to happen on your website, you need a decision engine to determine where the ads need to go. On your, uh, in the backend, you need a CDP to aggregate data, um, such that you can use it to build the right audiences. Um, for offsite, you need connections into Meta, Google, Pinterest.

[00:22:09] Drew Cashmore: Um, you need, uh, uh, to have DSPs to target customers, um, potentially across the internet, be integrated with CTV networks and CMSs for in store. And so I give you this answer a little bit. Um. Uh, arbitrarily or, or, um, a little bit open-ended because there is no true one architecture for retail media, but there’s a lot of disparate components that need to be brought together in order to make this thing work.

[00:22:37] Drew Cashmore: What is missing from this space, um, and why I joined Vantage is because we have this connective layer that brings together all of the, um, disparate components in retail media into a single, unified. Technology stack. So that be it, an ad server decision engine, be it, uh, in-store CMS, be it a CDP, everything happens in one activation layer and that all of it comes together, uh, more holistically.

[00:23:10] Drew Cashmore: And so I, I’d say to you, um, the true one end-to-end architecture doesn’t really exist, but you need something in place that is able to connect all of those disparate components into unified workflow. Um, so that your team is operating and your advertisers are operating in one place overall.

[00:23:30] Tessa Burg: Yeah. I think that’s really important for marketers to understand and isn’t obvious, and it’s because we as marketers are very driven by our goals to increase conversion, to increase that basket size, to drive the results, but what Vantage is giving them.

[00:23:51] Tessa Burg: Is an operational advantage and the more productive your workflow is, productivity drives growth as well. But that’s not always, you know, I, I’ve had the privilege on or whatever, sitting on both sides, like, you know, I’ve been as much in operations and I’m in operations now as I have leading marketing and it was always when I was in the operation seats.

[00:24:17] Tessa Burg: It was really hard to get the marketing and sales folks who are so driven to drive growth, to understand like, if we also look at how we operationalize our workflows in a more efficient way, it will drive growth. There is a direct connection, but not as direct as, like, I increase conversion, so I, I get, I get that.

[00:24:35] Tessa Burg: But I think, you know, if they’re super good at driving conversion and you bring in Vantage and it’s going to give you that layer and lens to have a more productive workflow from which to decision. That is going to scale faster than continuing to do a bunch of disparate activities all driving towards conversion.

[00:24:54] Drew Cashmore: Well, and and to that point, and exactly what you just said, workflow is not sexy. Workflow is not the cool thing. And so that, that means that you can either tell that story in a, in a, in a silo, um, and really try to get people to focus on what truly, truly matters. Um, or you can attach yourself to the narratives that are driving the, the story today, the CTVs of this world and the in-store digital screen networks and and so on.

[00:25:20] Drew Cashmore: And so it’s a really interesting moment we have in retail media where I. Frankly, the noise is, um, is driving the strategy or the, the most appealing part of this is driving the strategy, but the foundational components of this space are what’s gonna allow it to, um, to truly excel and to truly be competitive against Walmart.

[00:25:41] Drew Cashmore: I, I’ll tell you a story that when, when we built, um, when we built Walmart Connect initially, one of our first efforts was to make it easier for advertisers to buy. Um, we called it reducing buying friction. And the reason for that is you can, you can go in and try to get relationships internally, all you know, as much as you want.

[00:26:03] Drew Cashmore: But if the advertising business isn’t working, then when your merchants are in market helping you sell that proposition to, uh, advertisers, the advertisers will say it’s really hard to work with you. And then you lose your credibility. And so when I, I think about all of the components that need to happen to move this space forward, a core foundation that is easy to buy and appealing to buy for advertisers is one of the main things that’s gonna allow us to accelerate overall.

[00:26:34] Tessa Burg: I love it. Well, we are at time, time. I, I feel like we’re just getting started. Like this was an amazing conversation, drew, before we get off. Do you have any closing thoughts or any, anything else people should know about the Cannes Lions Festival?

[00:26:51] Drew Cashmore: No, I think, uh, just you should go, um, this has become one of the places you need to be in this space, in, in retail media.

[00:26:59] Drew Cashmore: Um, and, and I think presence in this space is just gonna elevate it more. We’ve a lot of work to do. In retail media, we have a lot of work to do to make it better, to make it more appealing for advertisers. Um, but we need to all get together and, and drive that and, and Cannes is one of those places that’s gonna do that for us. So.

[00:27:19] Tessa Burg: Well thank you Drew so much for being a guest. If listeners want to reach out to you or learn more, where can they find you?

[00:27:26] Drew Cashmore: LinkedIn, under Drew Cashmore. Um, you can find me there. It’s pretty easy. Not many other people have that name.

[00:27:32] Tessa Burg: No they don’t. I I, you were very easy to find. That was good.

[00:27:38] Drew Cashmore: Yes. My parents were thinking ahead to this, this exact moment.

[00:27:41] Tessa Burg: Yes. Yeah. I know. My, my parents weren’t, there were, my maiden name was Tessa Frazier and there ended up being a really famous artist in England named that. And that was very confusing ’cause I was not an artist, but not as many Tessa Burgs. So I married one.

[00:27:55] Drew Cashmore: One of you was gonna have to change your name.

[00:27:57] Tessa Burg: Yes, yes. Definitely wasn’t her. A local celebrity.

[00:28:03] Tessa Burg: Uh, thanks. If people wanna hear more episodes from Leader Generation, you can find them all at modop.com. That’s modop.com or wherever you listen to podcasts. And until next time, I feel like I have something else to say. But Drew, if I don’t talk to you again, I’ll see you next year at Cannes Lions.

[00:28:25] Drew Cashmore: Thanks, Tessa. Thanks Mod Op.