Broadsign and Mirakl Ads announced this week a strategic partnership at the 73rd Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in Cannes, France, designed to connect digital e-commerce advertising with in-store screen campaigns under a single planning and reporting framework - a pairing that reflects mounting pressure from advertisers who want to activate retail media across the entire shopper journey without maintaining separate vendor relationships for each channel.

The announcement

The partnership, announced on June 24, 2026, brings together two distinct technology stacks that have historically operated independently. Mirakl Ads is the retail media arm of Mirakl, a company founded in 2012 with dual headquarters in Boston and Paris, which describes itself as an "operating system for intelligent commerce." Broadsign is a Montreal-based platform that manages and monetizes out-of-home (OOH) media globally. According to Broadsign, more than 2.8 million static and digital signs running along roadways and inside airports, shopping malls, grocery and convenience stores, health clinics, transit systems, and other environments run on its platform.

The integration has a specific technical shape. Mirakl Ads will power the retail media network layer - handling the commerce logic, e-commerce placements, and marketplace monetization functions. Broadsign will manage the technical delivery of in-store content to physical screens. According to the announcement, retailers using Mirakl Ads will be able to offer their advertisers a unified buying experience: one campaign brief and one point of contact that covers both e-commerce placements and in-store digital screens.

That structural division between the two platforms - commerce logic on one side, screen delivery on the other - is not incidental. It reflects a deliberate decision to preserve retailer control over data, shopper experience, inventory, and pricing decisions. Neither company absorbs the other's function. Retailers retain ownership of what they have. What changes is the surface area visible to advertisers and the reporting consolidation that allows campaign performance across online and in-store environments to be viewed and optimized in one place.

Why the gap exists

Executing retail media campaigns across online, offline, and in-store channels today typically involves separate vendor management, fragmented planning processes, and siloed reporting, according to the announcement. That description matches what industry observers have documented more formally. The IAB Europe guide on retail media change management, published in April 2026, identified that delivering omnichannel retail media requires integrating CDPs, data clean rooms, personalisation engines, analytics platforms, retail-specific ad servers, and in-store digital networks with data and content systems - a list that makes plain why most retailers still treat the channels as separate exercises.

Advertisers, meanwhile, are increasingly asking for solutions that better reflect how consumers actually shop: researching a product online, then completing the purchase in a physical store. According to Forrester research cited in Amazon documentation, 72 percent of US retail sales occur in physical stores - a figure that illustrates the persistent gap between where most digital advertising reaches consumers and where those consumers ultimately spend. The Broadsign-Mirakl partnership is structured to address that gap at the point of campaign activation, not just at the level of audience data theory.

The fragmentation problem is not new, but the commercial pressure to solve it has intensified. Retail media spending is projected to exceed $300 billion globally by 2030, according to Omdia research published in September 2025, representing approximately 20 percent of total worldwide advertising revenue. At that scale, the operational friction of managing separate workflows for e-commerce placements and in-store screens becomes a meaningful cost - for retailers managing vendor relationships, for advertisers reconciling fragmented reports, and for agencies trying to demonstrate measurable return on combined budgets.

What the integration covers

Technically, the partnership has three distinct value propositions for different actors in the retail media ecosystem, each worth unpacking.

For retailers, the integration opens a path to monetizing physical in-store screen assets alongside existing online inventory. A retailer already running a retail media network on Mirakl Ads gains access to Broadsign's in-store infrastructure without having to negotiate a separate technology deployment or manage a distinct vendor relationship for the physical environment. Incremental revenue becomes available from a channel that would otherwise require separate build-out. According to Broadsign's website, the platform currently powers more than 35 in-store retail media networks globally, including relationships with major grocery, electronics, and specialty retailers.

For advertisers, the value is consolidated visibility. Campaign performance across online placements and in-store digital screens becomes viewable together, which means every dollar of spend can be measured, compared, and optimized across the full shopper journey. That capability closes what has been a persistent structural weakness in retail media reporting - the point at which a consumer crosses from a digital surface to a physical one and attribution typically breaks down. Measurement challenges have persistently ranked as the primary barrier to cross-channel retail media investment, according to research presented at the IAB Australia Commerce and Retail Media Summit in July 2025, where speakers identified omnichannel attribution complexity and standardization gaps as central unresolved issues.

For the broader retail media ecosystem, the Broadsign-Mirakl partnership represents a particular architectural approach. Rather than building a walled garden that requires advertisers to transact exclusively within a single platform, both companies preserve their open architectures. Retailers maintain flexibility to build on existing technology investments. Broadsign describes its platform as built on an open ecosystem that allows retailers to integrate with their preferred partners and technologies.

The companies behind the deal

Mirakl operates at a scale that gives this partnership commercial weight. According to Mirakl, its operating system currently supports a global ecosystem of more than 450 marketplaces, spanning both B2C and B2B categories, alongside a network of more than 100,000 third-party marketplace sellers. Brands including Macy's, Decathlon, Carrefour, Asos, and Airbus Helicopters use Mirakl's platform. The company's product suite spans an enterprise marketplace solution (Mirakl Platform), AI-powered multichannel selling (Mirakl Connect), its retail media offering (Mirakl Ads), and an agentic commerce infrastructure product called Mirakl Nexus.

Mirakl Ads has been active in building retail media partnerships before today. In July 2025, Criteo and Mirakl Ads announced a global integration targeting mid-to-long-tail advertisers and third-party sellers - a collaboration that combined Mirakl's marketplace ecosystem with Criteo's retail media supply and ad-serving technology. The Broadsign partnership extends Mirakl Ads in a different direction: not deeper into marketplace advertiser automation, but outward into the physical retail environment.

Broadsign has itself been expanding rapidly. The company acquired Place Exchange on November 25, 2025, in a deal that expanded its programmatically transactable inventory network to 1.8 million screens globally and brought the combined workforce to 370 people. Place Exchange operates as the largest independent supply-side platform (SSP) for digital out-of-home. That acquisition brought capabilities across on-screen cinema, programmatic audio, place-based video, and in-store retail media, as well as the PerView measurement solution and integrations with more than 50 omnichannel and OOH demand-side platforms.

Earlier this year, Broadsign announced a separate partnership with JB Hi-Fi, Australia's largest consumer electronics retailer, deploying the Broadsign Platform to build and scale an in-store retail media network spanning more than 200 stores. That deployment brought together Broadsign's platform with Criteo and Retail Media Works as integration partners, demonstrating the kind of open, partner-layered architecture that the Mirakl integration also relies on.

What both sides said

"Retail media has evolved rapidly, but online, offline, and in-store are often still treated as separate channels, leading to missed opportunities and revenue," said Mats Klevjer, Director of Partnerships for Retail Media at Broadsign. "Our work with Mirakl Ads on this integration breaks down those barriers, helping retailers give advertisers the ability to transact on in-store screens with the same ease and performance metrics they expect of digital campaigns."

"Retailers are asking for solutions that maximize the value of every customer touchpoint, both digital and physical," said Octavie Gosselin, Vice President of Mirakl Ads. "By partnering with Broadsign, we are setting out to build a truly unified omnichannel retail media platform. Brands will be able to benefit from a single campaign brief covering both their online and in-store presence, and the opportunity ahead, for retailers, advertisers, and the broader ecosystem, is significant."

Both statements reflect a commercial tension that is well documented in the industry. Retail media networks grew initially from e-commerce infrastructure - sponsored product listings, onsite display placements, search advertising on retailer websites. Physical in-store screens represent a meaningfully different inventory type: they operate in a different technical environment, are consumed differently by shoppers, and present different attribution challenges. The promise of a "single campaign brief" is straightforward to describe but technically demanding to deliver, because it requires that the systems managing e-commerce placements and in-store screen content can share data, communicate performance back to a unified reporting layer, and maintain shopper-level consistency even as the advertising surface changes.

Launch timeline and beta status

According to the announcement, beta testing is already underway, with the integration anticipated to launch in Q3 2026. Both companies indicate that phased capabilities are expected to expand beyond the initial release. The Q3 timeframe is specific but carries the usual caveats of pre-launch technical integrations, particularly ones that bridge historically separate technology stacks.

The Cannes Lions venue for this announcement is deliberate. The 73rd Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity ran from June 22 to 26, 2026, drawing CMOs, agency holding company executives, platform representatives, and media owners to the Croisette. Partnership announcements timed to Cannes carry implicit signals to potential retail clients about commitment level and strategic priority. Major ad technology deals and platform integrations are commonly staged at the festival to reach senior marketing decision-makers concentrated in a single location.

What this means for the marketing community

The Broadsign-Mirakl partnership matters to practitioners for a specific operational reason: it targets the handoff point where most retail media campaigns currently break. Digital campaign planning tools work well within their environments. In-store screen management works within its own environment. The link between them - shared audience data, unified frequency management, cross-channel attribution - is where complexity accumulates and where budgets become hard to justify against measured outcomes.

Research analyzed by PPC Land in June 2026 shows that siloed retail media attribution misses between 36 and 53 percent of true campaign return on investment, based on a meta-analysis of 150,000 campaigns and $350 million in ad spend across four large retail media networks. Cross-retailer and cross-channel effects are being systematically underreported, which means brands are making budget allocation decisions based on incomplete data. A partnership that produces genuinely consolidated reporting across online and in-store touchpoints would represent a real improvement in that environment.

What remains to be seen is whether the integration delivers on the unified reporting promise at the level of granularity that media buyers require. Shared performance visibility is achievable in principle. Shared audience identity - understanding that the shopper who saw a sponsored product listing online is the same person who later stood in front of an in-store screen - requires data infrastructure that connects e-commerce and physical environments at the individual level. That is a harder technical problem. Neither company's announcement specifies how shopper-level identity resolution will function across the integration, which is the operational detail that will determine how useful the measurement actually is for campaign optimization.

From a market structure perspective, the partnership adds another data point to the pattern of retail media technology consolidation. IAB Europe's updated Pan-European Retail and Commerce Media Landscape Map, published in October 2025, listed Broadsign among the in-store retail media ad technology providers alongside Stratacache, Grocery TV, Advertima, Vistar Media, and others. Mirakl appeared separately in the supply-side platform and ad technology provider category. Today's announcement effectively creates a cross-category link between those two segments - a move that could prompt comparable responses from competing platform combinations.

The Cannes Lions timing also situates the announcement within a dense week of retail media activity. IAB Europe hosted a retail media panel aboard the Criteo HQ Yacht on June 26, 2026, with discussion focused on retail media maturity, measurement beyond ROAS, and the role of collaboration in proving channel value. The consistent theme across Cannes 2026 retail media discussions was the gap between the strategic ambition to serve the full shopper journey and the operational reality of disconnected measurement systems.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Broadsign, a Montreal-based platform managing and monetizing out-of-home media with more than 2.8 million static and digital signs on its infrastructure globally, and Mirakl Ads, the retail media division of Mirakl, a company supporting more than 450 marketplaces and 100,000 third-party sellers worldwide.

What: A strategic partnership to build a technical integration connecting Mirakl Ads' retail media solution for e-commerce and digital marketplaces with Broadsign's in-store media platform, enabling advertisers to activate campaigns across both channels under a single campaign brief with unified performance reporting.

When: Announced on June 24, 2026, during the 73rd Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. Beta testing is already underway, with the integration anticipated to launch in Q3 2026.

Where: The partnership was announced in Cannes, France. The integration will be available to Mirakl's retail customers globally, with Broadsign's in-store infrastructure currently powering more than 35 retail media networks across multiple markets.

Why: Executing retail media campaigns across online, offline, and in-store channels currently requires separate vendor management, fragmented planning, and siloed reporting - a structural problem that limits advertiser investment and creates measurement gaps. The partnership aims to address those gaps by providing retailers with a single surface for monetizing both e-commerce and in-store screen inventory, and by giving advertisers consolidated campaign performance data across the full shopper journey.