Every year, #IntoTheMics gives us the chance to bring together the people and conversations that matter most to our industry. This year's flagship event, Activating the Future of Commerce Media, did exactly that — and then some. Held at the Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield HQ in Paris, the afternoon brought together brands, agencies, retailers, and media owners for three panels of honest, high-quality debate about where commerce media stands today — and where it needs to go.

Our CEO Gilles Chételat opened proceedings with a keynote on the next phase of commerce media — and it was here that we made our headline announcement: Connect ID. Not another universal identifier in an already crowded market, but something more purposeful: an orchestration and matching layer that acts as a translator between advertisers' CRM data and the wide range of existing digital identifiers across the Open Web. Data matchings happen securely within a data clean room environment, with a transparent revenue-sharing model designed to reward the publishers, retailers, and telcos who contribute data. Early proof-of-concept results showed a 281% increase in reach on previously inaccessible customer segments — and the room took notice.

Setting the Scene: Westfield Rise

Before the first panel, our own Bastien Faletto hosted a presentation from URW's Candice Mayer-Gillet, Managing Director of Westfield Rise, joined by Lionel Cohen and El Hassan Alassen from Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield. Hosting us at their HQ felt entirely fitting — URW are building something genuinely compelling with Westfield Rise, connecting physical retail environments with data-driven media activation, and their presentation set the commercial and strategic context perfectly for everything that followed.

‍Panel 1 — Measuring What Matters in Commerce Media

Moderated by Eric Gueilhers, Founder of Programmatique Marketing, the opening panel featured Margaux Langevin (Growth and Data Strategy, Senior Manager at URW), Abderrahim Taleb (Advanced Analytics & Measurement Director at WPP Media), and Dali Ben Aleya (CEO & Founder of Datagram.ai).

The conversation was frank: measurement, as we've known it, is broken. Fragmented data across channels, incompatible methodologies between retailers, and closed environments make genuine cross-channel attribution stubbornly difficult. But the panel moved quickly from diagnosis to direction. The concept gaining the most traction is iROAS — incremental ROAS — a metric capable of finally aligning marketing, commerce, and finance teams around a shared definition of value. Margaux brought it to life with Westfield Rise's approach to connecting DOOH and digital campaigns to real footfall — including a compelling Nespresso case study linking media exposure to actual in-store visits.

Panel 2 — Composability: Rethinking the CDP

Our co-founder and CTO Stéphane Dugelay moderated a panel that tackled the architecture question head-on, joined by François-Xavier Pierrel (Group Chief Data & Adtech Officer, TF1), Barry John (Head of Ad Operations, Channel 4), Paras Khushiramani (Data Analytics Director, Havas Business Science), and Thomas Dubois (Data & AI Marketing Expert, Snowflake).

As monolithic CDPs struggle to keep pace with the need for agility and interoperability, composable architectures are fast becoming the preferred model — and the Connect ID announcement earlier in the day provided a live illustration of exactly what that can look like in practice.

Panel 3 — How AI Is Transforming CDPs and the Wider Data Ecosystem

The final panel, moderated by Gilles, brought together Gwenola Coicaud (Retail Media Director, Kingfisher), Benoît Setif (Executive Director, fifty-five), Frédéric Clement (CPO, Unlimitail), and Alban Schleuniger (Leader Business Retail Media France, Valiuz) for a grounded and at times refreshingly candid discussion about AI in practice.

The ambition is real — smarter segmentation, faster activation, better attribution. But the panel was honest that none of it works without clean data and strong governance as a foundation. The closing theme on organisational adoption resonated deeply with us: the technology is largely ready; the harder work is bringing teams and clients along with it. From Benoît's weekly Friday demos at fifty-five to Gwenola's conviction that showing beats telling every time, the message was clear — culture is still the hardest thing to scale.

Days like this remind us why we built #IntoTheMics in the first place. The future of commerce media will be shaped by the people willing to ask the hard questions out loud — and we're proud to host that conversation.

Thank you to every speaker, panellist, and attendee who made it what it was. See you next year.

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