The Store as Stage: Reinventing the Shopper Experience at ADWEEK House Cannes Lions

In-store media has been top of mind for retail media leaders, but are agencies taking the hype as seriously?

At Commerce Connections during ADWEEK House Cannes, I had the opportunity to moderate a discussion with Paul Lentz, Executive Director, Head of Strategic Development at CVS Media Exchange, Austin Leonard, VP and GM of Dollar General Media Network, and Liz Roche, VP of Media and Measurement at Albertsons Media Collective, to discuss the evolving role of the store as a stage for retail media.

The panelists quickly aligned on one thing: the in-store hype is real.

“Over 95% of our products are purchased in stores. Our online e-commerce experience is actually great for discovery, but people aren’t converting there,” said CVS’ Lentz.

The importance of in-store is proven, but the challenge is meeting the expectations developed in the digital era around orchestration, measurement, and scale.

Rather than asking whether the store matters, the more difficult question is whether the industry is prepared to evaluate it.

The Store as Stage

For retailers operating thousands of locations, seamless media orchestration is more layered than executing digital campaigns. It requires coordinating merchandising, store operations, retail media, and technology to create a cohesive shopper experience.

That complexity is also an opportunity.

Shoppers don’t distinguish between trade media, shopper marketing, or retail media. To them, it’s simply part of the shopping experience. That’s why orchestration matters.

When brands show up consistently across digital and physical touchpoints, they strengthen brand equity while driving both trial and conversion. 

Lentz highlighted that the store is no longer simply the bottom of the funnel.

“It is more about informing you,” he said. “There’s a lot to discover, and that’s really the job that we’re fulfilling in all those different surfaces.”

The store increasingly supports awareness, consideration, discovery, and purchase within the same environment, making it one of retail media’s most powerful omnichannel touchpoints.

Scale Beyond Store Count

The panelists also challenged the industry’s definition of scale.

Scale isn’t measured by the number of stores, screens, or media surfaces a retailer owns. Those assets already exist. The real challenge is making them easy for brands to plan, activate, optimize, and measure consistently across thousands of locations while maintaining local relevance.

DG’s Leonard highlighted how AI-first planning is helping Dollar General scale its omnichannel experience in a way that is relevant and efficient. 

“It can help us build a digitally focused media plan that delivers across the right stores, not just turning on all stores and trying to figure out how to scale it,” Leonard said.

Physical footprint alone is no longer a competitive advantage. Operational scale, supported by intelligent planning, connected workflows, and integrated execution, allows retailers to deliver omnichannel campaigns that prove impact. 

Rethinking Measurement

Measurement remains one of the biggest barriers to broader adoption of in-store media.

Agencies have become accustomed to the deterministic, one-to-one measurement capabilities of digital channels. As a result, they often evaluate in-store media against standards that don’t fully reflect how consumers behave in physical environments.

“I think it’s okay to be ambitious about getting to one-to-one, but I don’t think we need to let good be the enemy of perfect,” said Albertsons’ Roche.

Rather than replicating digital measurement, there is an opportunity to develop frameworks that accurately capture how in-store media influences behavior while remaining comparable across channels.

The question isn’t whether in-store media looks exactly like digital media. It’s whether it moves the business.

Looking Ahead

The conversation now needs to move beyond proving that the store matters.

The opportunity is already there, and so are the consumers. 

The next phase of retail media will be defined by retailers, agencies, and brands working together to build orchestration and measurement frameworks that make in-store media easier to buy, easier to evaluate, and easier to scale.