### Event OverviewOn October 8, 2025, London will host the RetailMediaX Executive Brief, a flagship gathering for senior retail media leaders. This exclusive event is part of the Autumn Retail Festival, bringing together a cross-sector mix of retailers, brands, networks, and media agencies for collaborative panels, roundtables, and think tanks. Nicole Pilkington, global head of ecommerce acceleration at Barilla, is among the panelists tasked with addressing a critical challenge in commerce: bridging the gap between shopper inspiration and actual purchase.The event stands out for its specialization—attendance is limited to 50 vetted decision-makers, ensuring that every voice is heard and that sessions move beyond passive listening toward active co-creation of industry standards and solutions. Unlike traditional conferences, each panel is followed by peer-led roundtables, where participants work side-by-side to tackle immediate challenges and shape best practices in retail media strategy.### Retail Media’s Strategic TransformationRetail media has rapidly evolved into a cornerstone of digital commerce, shifting the relationship between brands, consumers, and retailers. Pilkington highlights a key trend: digital retail media enables brands to transition "from moments of inspiration directly to purchase," bypassing historical divides between advertising and sales. For Barilla, this shift means reorienting from local, channel-centric approaches to global, category-driven strategies. The company is deploying retail media for unified brand messaging worldwide and holistic activations centered around meal occasions, not just isolated products. Learn more about the challenges of unified messaging with our comprehensive guide to [product feed management](/blog/product_feed/).A broader industry movement supports this trajectory. According to the IAB Europe Retail Media Impact Summit 2025, defining the future of retail media includes exploring topics such as incrementality measurement, evolution of on-site opportunities, first-party data integration, and the development of commerce media standards. Retailers are increasingly becoming media owners, leveraging first-party data to personalize offers and optimize the customer journey. These changes are transforming the very infrastructure underpinning product catalogues, feeds, and e-commerce content.### Impact on Ecommerce and Content Infrastructure#### Influence on Product FeedsThe integration of retail media with ecommerce has profound effects on product data feeds. To deliver contextually relevant ads and promotions, brands and retailers are investing in richer, more dynamic feed formats—often integrating granular product attributes, inventory data, and real-time pricing information. Enhanced feeds not only power ad placements but also improve personalization at the point of inspiration, shortening the path to purchase. Our [blog post](/blog/common-mistakes-in-product-feed-uploads/) details common errors in product feed uploads; avoiding these errors is critical.Recent studies indicate that the most effective retail media campaigns utilize product feed enrichment tools and structured data, ensuring that ad units reflect up-to-date assortment details and promotional availability. As the boundaries blur between advertising and shoppable content, feed integration is emerging as a critical competitive differentiator.#### Standards in CataloguingAs global brands like Barilla move toward unified category-driven strategies, the need for cataloguing standards intensifies. Centralized, standardized taxonomies allow retailers to offer consistent messaging, facilitate cross-border activations, and support semantic search. Industry discussions at RetailMediaX and similar summits are increasingly focused on harmonizing product identifiers, classification schemas, and mapping mechanisms to fuel seamless omnichannel engagement. For insights into the importance of standardized cataloging, see our article on [product matrix](/blog/product_matrix-in-e-commerce/).#### Quality and Completeness of Product CardsRetail media’s evolution directly affects the design and information density of product cards (digital product listings). Today’s content infrastructure must support rich media, contextual callouts, detailed nutritional data (for food brands), and occasion-based grouping of products. Retailers and brands are leveraging content automation platforms and AI-powered editorial tools to scale up the quality and completeness of product cards, driving higher conversion rates.Recent expert commentary suggests that completeness is not just a technical problem but an opportunity for strategic differentiation: brands that invest in comprehensive, context-aware listings outperform competitors in both click-through and basket size metrics.#### Speed of Assortment RolloutOne of the most visible competitive advantages in retail media is the accelerated rollout of new assortments. By syncing product onboarding with ad campaign planning, brands can launch targeted promotions as soon as new products become available. No-code platforms and workflow automation tools are increasingly used to automate catalogue uploads, asset creation, and offer deployment across multiple retailers. [Delta Feed automation](/tools/deltafeed/) strategies can drastically reduce the time from product launch to retail activation.Industry leaders report that the time from product launch to retailMedia activation can be reduced from weeks to days—or even hours—with integrated content pipelines and cloud-based asset management systems. The pressure for speed is especially intense in categories characterized by frequent innovation (such as FMCG and consumer electronics).#### Adoption of No-Code and AI TechnologiesAutomation and artificial intelligence are rapidly reshaping content operations for retail media. No-code solutions enable marketing teams to orchestrate feed updates, campaign launches, and analytics reporting without technical intervention. AI applications in content creation—such as automated product descriptions, image generation, and multilingual adaptation—allow for scale and consistency across global initiatives.At events like RetailMediaX, a growing consensus holds that these technologies are not just tools for efficiency but foundational to collaborative innovation. AI-driven insights support smarter assortment curation, adaptive pricing strategies, and predictive promotion planning, while no-code platforms democratize campaign management and accelerate cross-functional workflows.### Industry Collaboration as an Innovation DriverPilkington emphasizes the importance of industry collaboration: closing the inspiration-to-purchase gap is "not something any one entity can do alone." RetailMediaX is positioned as a crucible for such cooperation, bringing together stakeholders who collectively define goals, share best practices, and align on deployment standards.Summits like Retail Media Strategies 2025 and the IAB Europe Impact Summit reflect the same ethos. They serve as platforms for decision-makers to exchange actionable intelligence—be it measurement frameworks, data privacy solutions, or omnichannel integration tactics. This collaborative approach is seen as essential for building resilient, future-proof retail media ecosystems.### Outlook and HypothesesAs digital retail media matures, several hypotheses emerge from the current wave of summits and executive briefings:- Retail media networks will converge further with ecommerce platforms, intensifying competition among retailers to own and monetize media inventory.- Regulatory scrutiny, especially around data privacy and cross-network measurement, will demand greater transparency and interoperability in cataloguing and feed management.- AI and automation will underpin not only operational efficiency but competitive innovation, with brands and retailers that leverage these technologies gaining early-mover advantages.- Tactical best practices established in collaborative think tanks and roundtables are likely to shape the next generation of standardized solutions, from campaign planning to shoppable content logistics.Industry observers anticipate ongoing shifts in consumer expectations, particularly around personalization and immediacy of offers. The winners in the evolving retail media landscape may be defined as much by their agility in content infrastructure deployment as by their media investment.For further insights on retail media strategy and upcoming event developments, see RetailX Events and IAB Europe.---NotPIM views this market evolution as crucial to e-commerce. The increasing importance of unified brand messaging, fast product rollout, and accurate, data-rich product feeds directly impacts NotPIM's clients' needs. We see NotPIM's solutions as especially relevant in navigating the challenges of rapid data updates, standardized cataloguing and automation. The platform streamlines product feed management, automating critical tasks and resolving issues posed by heterogeneous data sources and formats. Our clients consistently benefit from reduced costs, increased agility, and improved content quality, achieving competitiveness and success in this dynamic retail media marketplace.