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"It's not retail media anymore. It's intent media."
Three lines from Shoptalk Europe have stayed with me, and only one of them had a swear word in it. The other two came from opposite ends of the room. One from a spirits company, framing the future of retail media in five words. One from an outdoor brand, refusing to talk about technology at all. "It's not retail media anymore. It's intent media," said Danson Huang, Global VP Connected Commerce at Diageo. "Everybody wants something real," said Stuart Haselden, CEO of Arc'teryx. They sound unrelated. They're the same idea.
Let‘s start with Diageo, because it reframes everything
For years retail media has been treated as a conversion channel / the last nudge before checkout. tash whitmey, Managing Director, Tesco Media and Insight Platform (who nailed it every time she spoke), opened a panel by rejecting exactly that: "I'm on a mission to lift retail media out of the bottom of the funnel." The value, the panel argued, sits much earlier - in the moments where someone is still working out what they actually want.
Danson took it further. What brands are competing for isn't attention or shelf placement. It's the signal that tells you what someone is trying to achieve. Patricia Grundmann, Managing Director of OBI Advertising put a concrete shape on it: "If you answer the right question without the customer asking it, you can influence the decision." And the valuable audience isn't defined by what someone bought before ("people who buy paint") but by what they're trying to do now ("people renovating their homes"). Different brief. Definitely a more interesting one.
There was a refreshingly blunt admission underneath all this: the funnel is struggling. Social drives discovery, retail media sits in the middle, AI is starting to drive recommendations, and the linear journey was always a simplification. "The funnel is crap today," as one panellist put it (I love it when people don’t mince their words). Tesco's data backs the unease: 69% of customers decide during the shopping journey, not before it.
The clearest illustration was an LLM one. You can now tell Alexa you're going on holiday with two kids and ask what you need, and it returns the book you've been meaning to read, last year's sun cream, the travel essentials you always forget. The customer never searched for a product. They declared an intention, and the system turned it into recommendations. That's a meaningfully different interaction from a keyword search, and Europe is early enough in this shift to build it well rather than inherit the US's growing pains.
Let’s move to Arc'teryx, because it shows what you do with the signal
I went into the Arc'teryx session with Stuart Haselden not knowing what to expect, and it was the one I'd recommend to anyone. Not because it was about technology, but because it wasn't.
The through-line was focus. Not the quarterly-priorities kind, but focus as a structural commitment that runs through every decision. Snow. Trail. Climb. That's the filter. Not "is this a good idea?" but "does this belong to a mountain athlete?" If it doesn't, they don't do it. They exited roughly 40% of their wholesale accounts because those relationships were pulling them toward cheaper products and broader audiences. They killed a lifestyle sub-brand. They turned down celebrity partnerships.
Most retailers I speak to are trying to add channels, audiences and partnerships. Arc'teryx became a billion-dollar brand doing the opposite. Walking away from 40% of wholesale revenue is admittedly easier when you're Arc'teryx than when you're not, but the logic still tests well: every growth channel comes with a cost, and sometimes that cost is focus.
The reason the focus is possible is that they own the customer relationship end to end. Stuart's framing of DTC wasn't the usual margin story. It was about owning the relationship, the brand expression and the product decisions together, because if someone else owns the customer, eventually they start influencing your product. Asked about Jacob Elordi and Timothée Chalamet being seen in the brand, his answer was simply that they don't chase it: build something genuinely great and people find it. "Everybody wants something real."
What actually connects them
The thing that surprised me most across the whole event was how consistently the winning examples came back to clarity. Clarity of brand, of customer need, of execution. Technology kept showing up as the enabler; the strategy underneath was almost always simpler than you'd expect.
And in nearly every strong example, the customer had told the brand what they wanted, directly. Nadine GRAF, President EUKEM at Estée Lauder described the shift vividly: people no longer search "moisturiser for sensitive skin," they arrive with a brief: "I'm 35, I live in Barcelona, I have sensitive skin, and I want it to do x, y and z." Peter Ruis, Managing Director at John Lewis, made the related point that consumers don't notice channels, they notice whether the experience was good, and that in the high-stakes, emotional moments, the human relationship is the product. The retail media panels landed on the same word for what stores do that digital can't: confidence.
Danson and Stuart are describing the same prize from two ends. Intent media is the recognition that the signal - what someone is trying to achieve - is now the thing worth competing for. "Everybody wants something real" is what that signal feels like from the customer's side: not inferred from a click or a scroll, but declared.
That declared signal is harder to get hold of than behavioural data, and most retail systems still treat it as a transactional artefact rather than something worth building around. I think that's the gap worth closing.
It's also what we keep seeing through Appointedd. The moment a customer books or commits to something (a styling appointment, a new-parent consultation, a kitchen design session) they've done something much closer to the Alexa example than to a click. They've declared an occasion, a need, and a timing. They’ve told you who they are, what they want, when they want it, where they’ll be, and why. That's the signal the retail media panel spent forty minutes describing as the real prize. We call it Booked Intent®. If that's a conversation you're having internally, come and talk to us.
Leah Hutcheon
Founder and CEO, Appointedd
