How Dick’s, LiveRamp, and Adobe Linked Data to Creative for Personalized Retail Ads
Retail media networks have spent years amassing shopper data to tighten audience targeting. Now the focus is shifting to what happens after the audience is found: the message itself. During a panel at Cannes Lions, executives from Dick’s Sporting Goods, data platform LiveRamp, and software giant Adobe unveiled a partnership designed to bring that next step to life. By combining LiveRamp’s identity and audience tools with Adobe’s creative solutions, the trio intends to let brands running campaigns through Dick’s retail media network generate and test a far wider range of personalized ad messages than has been practical before.
The alliance is more an extension of existing toolchains than a greenfield build. Dick’s was already a LiveRamp customer for data connectivity and a user of Adobe’s creative ecosystem. The new arrangement weaves those capabilities together so that a marketer — say, a car manufacturer like Chevy — can isolate a regional audience of families active in youth sports and serve them a targeted local offer, rather than defaulting to a generic national brand spot. David Young, Dick’s VP of retail media, described the move as a way to get into brand budgets and tell brand stories that go beyond simple sell-through.
For LiveRamp and Adobe, the partnership offers a commercial template: pair audience data with creative variability and run it inside a retailer’s known customer environment. The promise is efficient experimentation. Instead of maintaining a handful of static ad versions, brands on Dick’s network could test multiple creative variants tuned to attributes such as geography, spending behavior, or app usage patterns from Dick’s Gamechanger youth-sports app.
Why This Partnership Signals the Next Phase of Retail Media
A Data-plus-Creative Model, Not Just Another Retail Media Play
Traditional retail media networks monetize on-site search and display by leveraging transactional data for targeting. The Dick’s-LiveRamp-Adobe tie-up goes a step further by making creative personalization a core feature, not an afterthought. Marie Knight, Adobe’s director of AI creative and commerce ecosystem, framed it simply: “It’s data plus creative for optimized and improved outcomes.” This shift matters because as retail media networks proliferate — from Amazon and Walmart to niche players — the ability to show a consumer something uniquely relevant can shift share of brand dollars from generic programmatic channels onto these closed ecosystems.
Leaning on a Curated Audience: Youth Sports Families
The partnership draws its edge from Dick’s specific consumer relationship. Unlike a mass-merchant, Dick’s has built trust with a narrow but deeply engaged audience: families of young athletes who travel for tournaments. Those households frequent Dick’s stores, use its Gamechanger app for scorekeeping and scheduling, and spend heavily on gear, lodging, and food. That identity, Young noted, gives the company “permission” to approach brand budgets with stories that support a lifestyle, not just a shopping cart. In practice, that could mean a hotel chain, car brand, or insurance provider using Dick’s data to reach traveling-sports families with a tailored ad that a general retail network could not credibly deliver.
Where This Fits in the Broader Retail Media Landscape
The Dick’s deal illustrates a maturation of the “retailer-as-publisher” concept. Early entrants sold inventory; now networks compete on the depth of the value they add beyond the transaction. Data connectivity alone is no longer a differentiator — what LiveRamp and Adobe are betting on is that coupling it with dynamic creative will become table stakes. This will likely accelerate demand for creative management platforms and encourage similar multitenant partnerships where a retailer’s proprietary audience data gets married to outside ad-tech stacks inside a walled garden.
What Brands and Retailers Should Take Away from the Dick’s Approach
For brands advertising inside retail media networks:
- Review whether your current campaigns default to broad national creative when the data infrastructure now exists to produce regional, demographic, or lifestyle variants. The Dick’s example suggests hyper-local or interest-specific creative can be executed without crippling cost if the network has pre-built integrations.
- Evaluate retail media partners not just on audience size but on the uniqueness of their first-party identity — a niche like youth travel sports may yield higher engagement and lower bid competition than a massive, undifferentiated shopper base.
For retailers building or expanding media networks:
- The partnership is a sign that creative variability will become a competitive requirement, not a premium add-on. If your network only offers static placements, you risk losing brand budgets to peers who enable automated personalization.
- Lean into whatever distinct customer relationship you own. Dick’s is monetizing its bond with traveling-sports families, not generic athletic gear buyers. Find your equivalent and build the data and creative tools to let advertisers tap it directly.
For the tech and martech sectors:
- The Dick’s deal is a replicable blueprint. Identity solutions (LiveRamp) and creative platforms (Adobe) that align with retailers’ existing stacks can create a sticky commercial offering that turns a network into a full-funnel advertising platform.
Risk & Opportunity Assessment
| Commercial Risk | Medium | Success depends on advertiser adoption and measurable ROI from personalized creative within Dick’s relatively niche audience. If brands do not see material sales lift versus standard targeted media, the partnership’s commercial promise deflates. |
| Competitive Risk | Medium | Rival retail media networks, particularly those with larger audience footprints like Amazon or Walmart, could replicate a similar data-plus-creative integration with their own martech partners, diluting the first-mover advantage. |
| Regulatory Risk | Low | The partnership uses first-party data within a consented retail environment; current privacy frameworks do not present an immediate barrier, though heightened scrutiny on data sharing between parties warrants monitoring. |
| Reputation Risk | Low | Consumers are accustomed to personalized retail ads. Risk would only rise if creative targeting were perceived as intrusive or if data-handling practices came under public criticism, which appears unlikely given Dick’s trusted brand. |
| Technology Disruption | Low | The underlying technologies — audience segmentation, dynamic creative optimization — are mature. Disruption would more likely come from a shift in ad-delivery standards (e.g., phasing out third-party cookies) that change how data flows into creative tools, but the partnership is already built on first-party and direct-data connections. |
| Commercial Opportunity | High | If brands see superior returns from personalized creative run against a loyal, high-spend audience of traveling-sports families, Dick’s network could attract a larger share of brand advertising budgets and command premium rates, while LiveRamp and Adobe gain a repeatable case study for other retailers. |
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