Discover education designed to inspire, empower and elevate your retail media expertise. Explore the first look at our featured sessions and the industry leaders set to take the stage at this year’s summit.
In a market where attention is harder to earn and growth pressure is constant, launching and building a successful challenger brand requires expertise and discipline. In this keynote, Eric Skae shares the methods that made start-up Carbone America’s fastest-growing national pasta sauce, drove sales over $100-million in just 5 years, and that earlier helped him build Popcornopolis Gourmet Popcorn and Rao’s Specialty Foods through successful acquisition.
Nearly a century after its founding, Giant Eagle is entering a new phase of growth shaped by a clear strategy, a team to win, a refreshed brand vision, and a relentless focus on delivering for its customers. By bringing together merchandising and marketing into a unified team, the company is strengthening its value proposition, piece by piece, capability by capability, and neighborhood by neighborhood. This presentation will lift the hood on what this shift has meant internally, as well as provide insight into how they're adapting to today's rapidly evolving retail landscape.
Leigh O'Donnell Head of Shopper and Category Insights Kantar
This year, AI shopping use will move from theoretical to table stakes. Shoppers are adopting AI tools at an accelerated rate, making these platforms the first shelf they encounter. For CPGs, this means the rules of winning are changing fast. Drawing on findings from Kantar's AI-Enabled Commerce Pulse, with a base of 2,000 shoppers, this session will decode the algorithmic shelf by identifying who's using and rejecting, how the path to purchase is changing, the categories that are most vulnerable, and which retailers and platforms have the most runway.
James Masson Director of Integrated Marketing High Liner Foods
Most CPG organizations have invested heavily in retail media, but far fewer have aligned their teams and processes to make it work at scale. As AI and agent-led optimization accelerate decision making and blur traditional roles, existing silos between brand, sales, commerce and analytics are increasingly exposed. This panel brings together CPG leaders who have navigated the challenging internal work: redefining ownership, rebalancing budgets, and resetting expectations around speed, accountability, and performance. Attendees will leave with a clearer view of how organizational alignment–not tools or tactics–has become the biggest determinant of retail media ROI.
Brands and retailers are entering a new era of AI partnerships as consumers increasingly turn to AI to guide their purchasing decisions. This convergence is redefining who controls the customer relationship, revealing new data dependencies and reshaping the future of retail media. This session offers a strategic perspective on what it means to protect the customer relationship when intelligence, influence and commerce flow through AI platforms.
In-store media only works when brands see it as simple, scalable and worth the investment. This session flips the perspective to the brand side: what do CPG marketers actually need from in-store media today? Hear directly from brand leaders on what's working, what's not, and how they assess in-store programs--from speed and creative flexibility to standardized formats and measurable results. We'll unpack how to design in-store media that feels as seamless as digital, drives sales at the shelf, and earns repeat brand investment.
Track: Omnichannel Retail Media Activation: Store + Digital In Sync
Retail media has scaled rapidly, but today's growth depends on more than onsite activation alone. As brands look to drive incremental sales and reach new and lapsed shoppers, offsite strategies have become a critical extension of retail media plans. This session will explore the growing complexity of the retail media ecosystem and how strategies are evolving to balance scale, performance and relevance. Experts will discuss how onsite and offsite tactics work together, why mindset matters in offsite environments, and what it takes to deliver sustainable, incremental growth as retail media enters its next phase.
Track: Omnichannel Retail Media Activation: Store + Digital In Sync
Ali Miller General Manager of Advertising Instacart
What happens when media, commerce and creativity become one connected growth engine? The entire retail and advertising ecosystem takes a new shape. In this session, Instacart examines the forces transforming how retailers and brands compete, looking beyond the surface to explore how things like AI, machine learning and closed-loop measurement are turning consumer signals into real business outcomes across digital platforms and physical stores. For leaders focused on what comes next, this is a strategic view of how collaboration, data and technology are converging to redefine the future of connected commerce.
Lori Burns Manager Global Marketing, North America Energizer
Renee Johnson Director of Media & Strategy SheSpeaks
As retail media matures, one thing is clear: shoppers respond most to content that authentically reflects their real needs, behaviors, and moments. In this joint session, Energizer and SheSpeaks pull back the curtain on how they use AI-powered influencer marketing to build high-performing retail media campaigns that impact everything from awareness to conversion. Attendees will walk away with practical insights on how to use AI to identify creators who influence real purchase behavior, translate shopper personas into high-converting creative and optimize influencer content for retail media, not just social.
Justin Jefferson VIce President of Strategy and Insights Keen Decision Systems
Bradley Keefer Chief Revenue Officer Keen Decision Systems
Retail media is the fastest-growing line item in marketing. But growth without measurement is just spending. As brands pour more dollars into retailer platforms, the hard questions remain unanswered: Where does the budget actually come from? Does retail media brand marketing outperform traditional display and TV? And when you spend with one retailer, does it lift sales at others? In this session, Keen brings together brand leaders to move past platform dashboards to decisions that actually matter. Drawing on trend analysis across hundreds of brands and billions in spend, the panel will use real data to tackle the questions most brands are asking but few are answering.
Track: Retail Media ROI, Measurement & Accountability
As AI increasingly takes over bidding, optimization, forecasting, and reporting, retail media and eCommerce professionals are asking a very real question: Will AI replace my job — or change it? In this session, uncover a practitioner’s perspective on how AI is already reshaping retail media roles across Amazon, Walmart, Kroger, and Instacart. The focus will be on how this shift impacts our day‑to‑day work, which responsibilities are being automated, which skills are becoming more valuable, and how professionals can adapt to work alongside AI — moving from execution toward higher‑impact decision‑making, orchestration, and commercial influence.
Neil Ford Director of Sales, Midwest and West Coast Big Happy
Contextual commerce is reshaping how brands show up in retail, shifting the focus from who the shopper is to what they’re doing, feeling, and ready to act on in real time. From in-store to offsite, leaders will break down how contextual strategies are unlocking new ways to influence decisions at the exact point when they matter most.
Track: Creative Excellence: Content, Context and Conversation
Retail media is rapidly changing and transforming aisles into dynamic, media-rich environments with screens, audio and digital messaging. But as this all unfolds, one question matters most: is any of it influencing consumer behavior at the moment of choice? This session will take a 360-degree look at the in-store media revolution, bringing together perspectives from retailers, shopper marketers and consumers to unpack what’s working, what’s not, and what’s next.
What's hype versus what's actually working? Drawing from new data in the Path to Purchase Institute's 2026 Retail Media Benchmark Report, this session examines where retail media is performing today, the strategic shifts brands and retailers are making next, and how changes in investment, measurement and organizational capabilities signal a turning point for the industry. Get a data-backed look at what retail media is becoming, not just what it has been.
As brands demand clearer performance signals and retailers look to scale monetization of first-party data, convenience retail media is at an inflection point. High-frequency trips, immediate purchase intent and growing in-store digital touchpoints create a distinct opportunity—one that’s often measured through frameworks built for grocery and mass. This session unveils fresh research from the Path to Purchase Institute and Convenience Store News, establishing a shared view of what’s working, where gaps remain and how the convenience channel moves forward.
