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Unlimitail, the retail-media joint venture created by Carrefour and Publicis Groupe, has chosen data-cloud company Snowflake as the technology backbone for a new Global Retail Media Data Hub it plans to launch later this year.
The hub is designed to act as a single connection point linking retailers, brands and advertising agencies, and will be built on Snowflake’s data clean rooms — a technology that lets different companies analyse and compare data sets without handing over or exposing their raw customer records.
Unlimitail framed the platform as an answer to two persistent problems in retail media: enabling secure data collaboration among multiple retailers, and producing better measurement of whether advertising actually works. Retailers keep full control of their own first-party customer data while still being able to collaborate with brands and partners.
“Most retail media measurement stops at the click,” said Simon Contreras, industry principal for retail and consumer goods at Snowflake. “With Unlimitail, brands can go all the way to the receipt, and that changes the conversation they can have about the ROI of their retail media investment.”
Retail media — the business of retailers selling advertising against their own shopper data — has become one of the fastest-growing corners of digital advertising, prized because first-party purchase data is more durable than the third-party tracking cookies that web browsers have been phasing out. Data clean rooms have emerged as a favoured way to put that data to work while limiting privacy exposure.
Unlimitail said its network spans 120 retail sites. The company, which by its own figures reaches around 250 million shoppers and generates more than 3 billion page views a month, counts over 35 retail partners including MediaMarkt Saturn, MyOrigines, ID Kids and Hygie 31. The data hub is set to serve markets across Europe and Latin America, including Brazil and Argentina.
Carrefour and Publicis launched Unlimitail in 2023 to combine the French retailer’s shopper data with the advertising group’s media expertise and sell retail-media services to other retailers. Building on Snowflake’s “zero-copy” architecture, the venture said role-based controls would ensure each retailer sees only the data it is entitled to.
Unlimitail did not give a precise launch date beyond “later this year,” nor disclose financial terms of the Snowflake arrangement. The deal nonetheless underscores how retail-media networks are increasingly competing on data infrastructure and measurement as much as on advertising inventory.
