We Made It to the Stage at the dunnhumby EMEA Retail Innovation Forum. Here's What We Learned
In April, our co-founder took the stage at the dunnhumby EMEA Retail Innovation Forum in London as a finalist in the Ecosystem Startup of the Year Competition. It was a milestone moment for GreenJinn and MediaSight, and being in that room gave us a front-row seat to where retail is heading.
Here is what we came away thinking about.
We will be honest: being selected as a finalist for dunnhumby's Ecosystem Startup of the Year Competition is not something we took for granted. The competition, launched alongside the 2026 EMEA Retail Innovation Forum, was open to retail and consumer goods technology startups with proven commercial traction, live deployments, and validated impact. The bar was high. The room on 21st April at the Forum in London was filled with over 200 of the most senior retail and retail technology leaders in Europe, alongside founders and investors who have seen a lot of pitches.
Standing on that stage, presenting what we have built and why it matters, was a reminder of why we do this work, and a remarkable opportunity to stress-test our thinking against some of the sharpest minds in the industry.
Here is what the day, and the broader Forum conversations, taught us.
What It Takes to Get to the Finalist Stage
The Ecosystem Startup of the Year Competition was designed with a clear brief: find adoption-ready innovation that is already working in the real world. dunnhumby was not looking for concept-stage ideas. They were looking for technology that had been validated in a retail environment, was live with real clients, and could demonstrate a credible path to scale.
For us, that brief fits naturally. GreenJinn's first-party shopper data platform, and the retail media and audience solutions we build on top of it through MediaSight, is not a prototype. It is live, it is generating measurable outcomes for FMCG brands, and it is solving a problem the industry has been wrestling with for years: how do you connect media investment to verified purchase behaviour, at scale, without relying on walled gardens or self-reported metrics?
That is the case we made on stage. And the conversations that followed, with retailers, brand leaders, and investors in the room, confirmed that the problem we are solving is very much still unsolved for most of the market.
MediaSight Insight: Our first-party data, sourced directly from GreenJinn's shopper platform, gives FMCG brands a genuine closed-loop view of retail media performance. When we say a campaign drove incremental purchases, we can prove it — down to the basket.
Retail Media Has Reached the Top of the Agenda, But the Hard Questions Are Just Beginning
Being a presenter rather than just an attendee changes how you absorb a forum like this. You are not just listening, you are watching how an audience of senior retail leaders responds to ideas, where they lean forward, where they push back.
The conversation around retail media was sharp and, at times, uncomfortable in the best way. Retail media has, as dunnhumby put it, "surged to the top of marketing priorities." But with that maturity comes accountability, and the industry is not yet fully equipped to deliver it.
The questions dominating the room:
Measurement standards remain fragmented. Brands are comparing apples to oranges across retail media networks. Without common attribution models, ROI claims are hard to validate and harder to act on.
Creative and operational innovation is lagging. Most retail media inventory is still being served with repurposed digital assets. As the channel matures, that gap is becoming a genuine competitive disadvantage.
Data connectivity is the unlock nobody has fully cracked. Unifying fragmented media ecosystems through better collaboration models, between retailers, brands, and technology partners, was a recurring theme. Everyone agreed on the destination. The route remains contested.
These are not abstract challenges. They are the exact problems we hear from brand clients every week, and that we built MediaSight to help solve.
MediaSight Insight: Our solutions help brands build a clear, verified picture of what their retail media investment is actually delivering, cutting through self-reported network metrics to connect spend to real shopper behaviour.
Agentic Commerce Is Coming, and It Will Reshape the Retail Media Opportunity
One of the Forum's most forward-looking threads was the rise of agentic commerce: AI-powered agents and autonomous shopping tools that increasingly make or influence purchase decisions on behalf of consumers. As these tools proliferate, the traditional model of reaching a shopper at the digital shelf, via a sponsored listing or an onsite banner, becomes more complicated.
If an AI agent is doing the browsing, who does the ad reach? And how does a brand stay visible and relevant to a technology acting as intermediary?
The Forum's answer was not panic, but preparation:
Design for both humans and their digital proxies. Brands need to think about how their products are surfaced, described, and ranked in environments where algorithms, not people, are making the first pass.
First-party data becomes even more strategic. Understanding shopper behaviour in context, not just in aggregate, is what will allow brands to remain relevant as commerce becomes more automated.
Loyalty and personalisation are the foundation. Retailers and brands that have invested in loyalty infrastructure will be better positioned to feed the data signals that agentic systems depend on.
As a business that sits at the intersection of shopper data and media activation, this conversation felt particularly relevant to us. The brands that build genuine, first-party relationships with their shoppers now will be the ones with the strongest signal advantage as AI intermediaries multiply.
MediaSight Insight: This is precisely why we help brand partners build data strategies that go beyond campaign activation. Understanding who your shoppers actually are and what drives their decisions is the asset that holds its value as the technology around commerce changes.
The Store Is Getting Smarter and In-Store Retail Media Is Following
A strong thread at the Forum was the physical store's transformation from a point of sale into an intelligent, data-enriched space. Spatial AI and what some speakers called "synthetic customers", AI-generated shopper twins used to simulate behaviour and test layouts, are opening up entirely new ways to design and personalise the in-store experience.
For retail media, this has direct implications. In-store media networks, screens, audio, shelf-edge technology, are becoming increasingly programmable and measurable. The brands that learn to activate in-store retail media with the same rigour they apply to digital will have a meaningful advantage.
MediaSight Insight: Our omnichannel media activation solutions are built for exactly this convergence. Whether a shopper encounters your brand on a retailer's app, at the digital shelf, or on a screen in the aisle, we help ensure those touchpoints are connected, consistent, and measurable.
What Being in That Room Really Means
Pitching at the dunnhumby EMEA Retail Innovation Forum is not just a badge. It is a conversation, with people who are making real decisions about where to invest, what to build, and who to partner with. The relationships that started on 21st April are ones we intend to keep building.
But beyond our own experience on stage, the day reinforced something we come back to constantly: retail media is not a channel, it is a capability. The brands that treat it as a checkbox miss the point. The ones that invest in the data, the measurement discipline, and the creative rigour to make it work properly are the ones pulling ahead.
If the themes from this Forum have prompted questions about how your brand is approaching retail media, whether around measurement, data connectivity, or in-store activation, we would love to talk.
