Retail media moves to one brief, on and off screen

At Cannes Lions on 24 June 2026, Broadsign and Mirakl Ads announced a strategic partnership with a specific ambition: end the split between online and in-store retail media. Mirakl Ads powers retail media across e-commerce and marketplaces; Broadsign runs the in-store screen delivery. Wired together, a retailer’s advertisers get one campaign brief and one point of contact covering both digital placements and in-store digital screens — with Mirakl powering the network and Broadsign handling the physical delivery, while the retailer keeps control of pricing, inventory, data and shopper experience. Beta is underway; first phase is slated for Q3 2026. For our thesis, the interesting word is “in-store”: the screen just got folded into the retail-media buy.

What happened

Retail media split cleanly in two: the huge, mature online side (sponsored products, marketplace ads) and a younger, messier in-store side (screens, shelf-edge, audio). Buying them was two motions — different platforms, different contacts, different reporting. This partnership tries to collapse that into a single omnichannel buy, so a brand briefing a retailer’s media network can add in-store screens to the same campaign it already runs on the retailer’s website. That’s a distribution change more than a technology one: it puts the physical screen in front of every advertiser already spending on the retailer’s online inventory, instead of asking them to seek it out.

What it means for beauty

The in-store beauty screen is the surface in question. Retail media’s fastest-growing physical inventory is exactly the place-based screen family beauty belongs to. Our retail-media-vs-place-based-DOOH analysis argues these two things are converging; this deal is that convergence in product form, and it’s why the beauty-DOOH-vs-in-store-retail-media guide exists.
“One brief” changes who buys the screen. The reason place-based beauty inventory is hard to sell is that it’s a separate, deliberate buy. Fold it into an omnichannel retail-media brief and the endemic beauty advertiser already spending on the retailer’s site inherits the screen without a new decision — the media-mix argument makes itself.
But it accrues to the retailer’s network, not to independents. The retailer keeps pricing, inventory and data — so the value pools where the shopper data lives. For an independent beauty network (salons, clinics, spas), the lesson is defensive: the way to stay relevant next to retailer-owned screens is a differentiated audience and a real attribution story, which is the endemic-selling and O2O-attribution work, not a race on scale you can’t win.

The caveat that keeps us honest

This is an announcement with a Q3-2026 beta, not shipped-and-measured infrastructure — the “one brief” experience is a stated design goal, and no adoption, revenue or lift figure exists yet to tag. It’s also a retail-media deal: it strengthens retailer-owned screen networks specifically, which is a different animal from an independent beauty network, however much the venue types rhyme. Nothing beauty-specific is asserted beyond what our Research supports. The durable, transferable point stands regardless of this particular integration’s success: the boundary between online and in-store retail media is dissolving, and when it does, the in-store screen stops being an optional buy — which is the structural tailwind under place-based beauty DOOH.