The announcement was made during the 2026 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, where Amperity said the recognition reflects its collaboration with Snowflake in enabling brands to build trusted customer data foundations for AI-powered marketing.

Now in its fifth year, Snowflake’s Modern Marketing Data Stack report examines the evolution of marketing technology from fragmented systems to AI-driven platforms supported by governed data. According to Snowflake, the report draws insights from more than 11,500 customers and ecosystem partners across 13 categories, focusing on how organisations are bringing applications closer to their data to improve execution, business outcomes, and governance while addressing data privacy and trust.

Amperity said its platform helps organisations unify fragmented customer data into trusted customer profiles that can be used by teams, systems, and AI applications to support real-time customer engagement.

“AI only creates value when brands can recognise customers, understand their context and respond in the moments that matter. That requires more than access to data. It requires trusted customer context that systems, teams, and AI can act on in real time,” said Bridget Perry, Chief Marketing Officer at Amperity. “Together with Snowflake, we’re helping brands turn customer signals into decisions and action.”

According to the company, combining its customer data capabilities with Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud enables brands to use customer signals throughout the customer lifecycle for real-time decision-making and activation.

“As marketing shifts from workflows built around campaigns to systems built around real-time decisions, trusted and interoperable customer data becomes foundational,” said Denise Persson, Chief Marketing Officer at Snowflake. “Amperity helps brands activate that data into connected experiences and AI-driven outcomes at scale.”

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In this feature, leading experts across sports, marketing and event technology reveal what it takes for sporting, media and entertainment organisations to win captive audiences before, during and after a major event with the latest in data tech innovation.

The fragmentation problem

Millions of interactions across ticketing, merchandise, concessions, mobile apps, loyalty programmes and marketing channels can tell a powerful story about fans. But when the data sits in disconnected systems, organisations are left with fragments: a ticket buyer over here, an email subscriber over there, a merchandise customer somewhere else.

According to Billy Loizou, APAC Area Vice President, Amperity, for global events such as the FIFA World Cup, the scale of the fragmentation challenge is enormous.

“That fragmentation makes it harder to deliver the experiences fans now expect. It also makes it harder for teams, leagues and rights holders to grow,” he says. 

Peter Filopoulos, Chief Marketing and Digital Officer – Consultant, Canadian Soccer Media & Entertainment  (Formerly at Football Australia) agrees. In a recent sports, media and entertainment report launched by Braze, he explains how most organisations don’t suffer from lack of data, they suffer from fragmentation and misalignment. 

“Data sits in silos, systems don’t talk to each other, and no one owns the full fan relationship,” he says. “So insight becomes reporting instead of action” This isn’t a technology problem. It’s a governance, structure and leadership problem.” 

“The goal isn’t more data. It’s better signals. Who is this person? What do they care about? What’s valuable to them now?” he says.

Loizou explains how a single fan can leave a trail across dozens of touchpoints. They may hold a membership, buy tickets through a primary channel, purchase a jersey online, engage with a mobile app, respond to an email campaign and order food inside the stadium.

“In a traditional data environment, that same person may appear as five or six separate records, each incomplete. The organisation knows a lot, but it does not know enough in the moments that matter,” he explains.

This creates practical problems, he adds. Marketing teams spend days building segments that should take minutes. Offers reach the wrong people or miss obvious opportunities. Fans receive irrelevant communications because the organisation cannot see their actual preferences, behaviours or level of engagement. Corporate partners also miss out on stronger audience insights, and revenue opportunities are left on the table.

“You cannot deliver great fan experiences without great data. When fan records are unified into a single, accurate profile, the possibilities change. Teams can understand who their fans are, anticipate what they may need next and make every interaction feel more relevant,” he adds.

“That matters because sport is emotional. When fans feel recognised, it deepens the connection they have with a team, a league or an event. That connection is what keeps people coming back season after season.”

Personalisation to prediction

As AI and predictive analytics mature, fan engagement is moving from personalisation to prediction. Instead of waiting to see how fans behave, organisations can anticipate what they are likely to want next.

But according to Loizou, the promise of AI depends on the quality of the data underneath it. If the fan profile is incomplete, duplicated or out of date, the experience will be too.

“That is why unified customer data has become a strategic asset for sports organisations. Platforms such as Amperity help bring together disconnected records from ticketing, CRM, email, commerce, analytics and other systems, using AI-powered identity resolution to create accurate, actionable fan profiles,” he adds.

Greater tech opportunity equals greater complexity?

Sporting organisations have never had more opportunities to engage fans, but they have also never faced greater complexity, says Louis Rogers, Senior Director of Partnerships & Sales, APAC, Leap Event Technology.

“Event technology is gradually enabling the unification of data. API connections between platforms like ticketing and CRM systems, as well as digital marketing tracking, build a clearer picture of who the fans are and the stimulus they respond to. But we’re a long way from all event-related systems talking to each other,” Rogers says.

“It’s important to note that it is still fairly common for some systems to be deliberately isolationist in how they capture and retain data. For example, not all ticketing companies make the data they capture available to their clients, or provide analytical tools. So making the data available and accessible is the most basic first step.”

According to Rogers, as expectations continue to rise, loyal supporters increasingly expect the same seamless digital experiences they receive from leading retailers, airlines and entertainment brands. They want simple registration, personalised communications, frictionless ticketing, easy upgrades and relevant offers throughout their entire journey with a club, league or sporting event.

“The organisations that succeed will be those that treat every interaction as part of one connected relationship, rather than a series of isolated transactions,” he adds’

“This becomes even more important during major sporting events, where fan engagement extends well beyond the game itself. From participant registrations and volunteer management through to hospitality, merchandise, premium experiences and post-event engagement, every touchpoint shapes how people remember an event and whether they return.”

A modern event technology platform helps bring these experiences together. By connecting registrations, ticketing, memberships, payments, communications and event operations into a single ecosystem, sporting organisations gain a clearer understanding of their audiences while reducing operational complexity behind the scenes.

“That creates benefits on both sides,” Rogers adds. “Fans enjoy a more personalised, intuitive experience, while organisers gain better visibility into attendance, participation, revenue opportunities and long-term engagement. Instead of reacting to isolated data points, they can make informed decisions in real time and build stronger, more valuable relationships over multiple seasons.”

The Seattle Sounders offer a useful example of what success looks like in practice

The club had invested in ticketing, CRM, email, personalisation and other systems, but those systems were not fully connected. That made it difficult to understand how fans interacted across the full relationship.

By working with Amperity, the Sounders unified data from systems including SeatGeek, Ticketmaster, ExactTarget, Einstein Predictive Data, email subscribers and the league CRM. Machine learning helped resolve identities, deduplicate records and build richer fan profiles, even when data sources lacked common linking keys.

The result was a clearer view of fans and previously hidden segments: supporters who only attended matches against a specific opponent, last-minute ticket buyers, primary-channel purchasers who did not buy resale tickets, and fans at risk of churn.

With better segmentation, the Sounders were able to send fewer emails while making them more relevant. The club drove a 22 percent increase in open rates, a 29 percent increase in click-through rate and an 80 percent increase in conversions for a season-ticket reserve programme compared with the previous year.

The Oakland Roots and Soul Sports Club also offers a useful example of what success looks like in practice

They recruited Leap Event Technology as their trusted team member to scale their marketing and advertising efforts, scaling email marketing campaigns and bold, engaging, targeted ads to drive ticket sales and attendance to key sporting events. 

By leveraging Leap event technology, the club saw a 3 fold increase in email subscribers and a 7x return on ad spend. Oakland Roots achieved a record 26,575 ticket sales to their home opener and double the event attendance from 2024 to 2025.

After playing an instrumental role in achieving this milestone, Leap continues to provide data-driven value to this partnership. In 2025, this sports club achieved the first and third highest attended games across the league, ranking them with the sixth highest attendance overall in the USL.

The future of fan engagement starts with solid tech innovation

Ultimately, experts agree the future of great sporting experiences like the FIFA World Cup is not simply about delivering great events. It is about building lasting communities around those events. 

“Sports organisations are no longer competing only with other teams or events,” Loizou says. “They are competing with every digital experience that has trained people to expect relevance, immediacy and ease.”

“The sporting organisations that invest in connected technology today will be the ones best positioned to grow participation, strengthen loyalty and unlock new commercial opportunities tomorrow,” Rogers concludes.

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The findings, drawn from Amperity’s The 2026 Consumer Priorities Report: The New Rules of Loyalty in the Age of AI, examine how generative AI is reshaping the way consumers discover brands, make purchase decisions, and define loyalty. The study is based on a survey of 1,000 U.S. consumers aged 18 to 65 conducted in May 2026 using Pollfish.

The research shows that consumers are increasingly relying on AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini to compare products, plan travel, and evaluate services, placing new pressure on brands competing for attention and loyalty. 

While personalisation remains important to consumers, the report notes that its effectiveness depends on whether experiences are perceived as relevant, timely, and trustworthy.

According to the report, 80% of generative AI users said they use tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini to research products, compare services, or plan travel, while the same proportion said they sometimes or often act on AI-generated recommendations by clicking links, making purchases, or booking services. In addition, 60% of respondents said AI has led them to choose a brand they had not previously considered, while only 23% said they go directly to familiar brands without first considering AI recommendations.

The study also found that 63% of consumers would switch brands for a better offer, underscoring the increasingly conditional nature of loyalty. It added that loyalty programmes, rewards, and consistent cross-channel experiences remain among the strongest drivers of customer retention, although respondents indicated they are typically loyal to only a small number of brands within each category.

On personalisation, 72% of consumers said tailored experiences are somewhat or very important when choosing a brand, while 58% said invasive or “creepy” personalisation makes them less likely to engage. Meanwhile, 78% said they are more likely to interact with personalised experiences when they trust how their data is being used. Consumers also reported growing frustration with irrelevant, repetitive, and poorly timed brand interactions.

Overall, the findings point to a broader shift in how brands compete in an AI-driven marketplace, where consumers increasingly depend on AI tools to surface options and compare offerings. The report suggests that brands will need to move beyond static campaigns and fragmented customer journeys toward real-time decision-making grounded in trusted customer context.

“Consumers are increasingly turning to AI to help them decide what to buy, where to travel, and which brands to trust. That means loyalty can no longer be taken for granted,” said Derek Slager, Co-Founder and co-CEO of Amperity. “In an AI-driven marketplace, brands need more than customer data. They need trusted customer context that helps them recognise intent and respond with relevance in the moments that matter.”

“Personalisation isn’t the goal. Relevance is,” Slager continued. “Consumers are willing to share data when they see value in return, but they expect brands to use that information responsibly and intelligently. As AI becomes a bigger part of how consumers discover and evaluate brands, the ability to act on trusted customer context becomes a competitive advantage.”

The 2026 Consumer Priorities Report: The New Rules of Loyalty in the Age of AI explores how AI is reshaping customer expectations, loyalty, personalisation, and brand discovery across retail, travel, and service industries.

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The Inside Digital & eCommerce 2026 report from Arktic Fox, Six Degrees Executive, and Amperity found that while 89.1% of retailers consider personalisation strategically important, only 10% believe they have the mature capabilities needed to deliver it effectively. 

Just 12% said they were fully confident their customer and product data foundations were ready to support AI-driven use cases.

The report, based on responses from more than 100 Australian marketing, digital, ecommerce and retail media leaders, points to a widening gap between AI ambition and execution readiness.

“Retailers and brands understand where the market is heading, particularly as AI reshapes how consumers discover, evaluate and purchase products,” said Teresa Sperti, Director, Arktic Fox. “However, many organisations are still operating across fragmented customer data, disconnected systems and siloed teams, making it difficult to turn customer signals into connected, real-time engagement.”

More than 80% of retail leaders said their identity resolution and single customer view capabilities are still developing, while 73.3% described their martech and data ecosystems as only partially integrated.

The challenges extend to omnichannel experiences. According to the report, 83.7% of retail leaders said their ability to enable seamless movement across channels remains underdeveloped, while 77.1% reported immature capabilities in delivering integrated fulfilment and returns experiences.

Retailers identified AI-powered product content creation, search optimisation and AI-driven personalisation as top priorities over the next 12 to 18 months. 

Meanwhile, 57.8% plan to invest in customer data platforms, making CDPs the sector’s leading martech investment priority.

The report also highlighted growing concerns around retail media measurement. While 52.9% of consumer brands plan to increase retail media spending in the coming year, only 4.9% said they have high trust in retail media networks, and 73.2% cited difficulties measuring return on investment.

“Brands are under growing pressure to prove business impact, but many still struggle to connect digital engagement, in-store behaviour and customer outcomes in a consistent and privacy-safe way,” said Billy Loizou, Area Vice President for Asia Pacific at Amperity.

The findings suggest that while retailers are moving quickly to adopt AI and prepare for emerging trends such as agentic commerce, many still need to address fragmented data and measurement challenges before they can fully deliver on those investments.

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This article explains how the acquisition signals a much bigger shift and that in the AI era, customer identity and intelligence infrastructure are becoming strategic enterprise control points.

The ‘customer graph’ is becoming the operating system for enterprise AI. That is the real story behind Publicis’ acquisition of LiveRamp

It’s not about consolidation, scale, or martech synergies. The question this deal forces every brand to answer is simpler and more consequential: who controls the intelligence layer your AI runs on?

For years, identity resolution and data collaboration were treated as plumbing — necessary, unglamorous, largely invisible. Publicis just paid $2.2 billion to make clear that they are now the foundation on which AI understands customers, makes decisions, and drives action across the enterprise. That is not infrastructure anymore. That is leverage.

Here is what most AI strategies get wrong: The model is not the moat

Foundation models are commoditising fast, and within a few years most enterprises will have access to roughly equivalent AI capabilities. The differentiation will not come from which model you run. It will come from what that model knows about your customers, and how accurately, durably, and quickly it can act on that intelligence.

In that environment, identity, first-party customer data, and interoperability become foundational enterprise infrastructure. The companies that win will be the ones capable of creating trusted customer context that AI systems can act on in real time.

That is the bet Publicis just made. And it should prompt every brand to ask whether they are making it too — or ceding that ground by default.

AI does not fix broken customer intelligence

There is still a tendency in the market to talk about AI as though the model itself is the differentiator. In practice, the differentiator is whether AI has access to accurate, durable, and real-time customer context.

If the underlying customer data is fragmented, duplicated, stale, or disconnected from durable identity, AI simply accelerates poor decisions. A recommendation engine becomes confidently wrong. Suppression fails. Media spend gets wasted targeting customers who have already converted. Personalisation becomes irrelevant because different systems hold conflicting versions of the same customer.

We already see this problem today. A customer purchases in-store but continues receiving acquisition ads for days because identity systems across retail, media, and CRM environments are disconnected. AI does not solve that problem. It amplifies it if the underlying customer graph is inaccurate.

That is why this acquisition matters beyond advertising technology.

The industry is shifting from systems of record to systems of decision and action. The companies pulling ahead are not necessarily the ones with the most data. They are the ones capable of continuously transforming customer signals into intelligent decisions in real time.

Durable identity is the moat. Not the model.

Brands should own the intelligence layer

LiveRamp built its business on neutrality. Sitting between advertisers, publishers, retailers, and agencies, it acted as trusted connective tissue — a Switzerland of identity. Publicis acquiring it changes that, regardless of what the integration roadmap says. You cannot be neutral infrastructure when you are owned by one of the largest buyers of media on the planet.

The conflict of interest is not subtle. Publicis now has a financial stake in how your identity data is resolved, governed, and operationalised — and a separate financial stake in winning your media budget. Those two incentives do not point in the same direction. Enterprises should not need to trust that they will be managed independently. They should not have to trust at all.

This is not a criticism of Publicis. It is a structural reality. And the right response for enterprises is not to hope for the best — it is to own the layer that makes the question irrelevant.

This will accelerate demand for independent customer intelligence layers that sit above activation and media ecosystems rather than inside them — particularly for enterprises operating across multiple agencies, retail media networks, cloud providers, and AI platforms simultaneously.

Most large enterprises do not want their customer intelligence strategy dependent on a single identity, media, or activation ecosystem. They want the flexibility to choose the partners and activation rails that best fit their business while maintaining ownership of the customer graph itself.

That becomes especially important as more enterprises build internal AI capabilities and deploy AI agents across marketing, service, and commerce. The intelligence layer powering those systems is becoming too strategic to fully outsource or embed inside a single activation ecosystem.

The black box problem gets harder in the AI era

There is a harder conversation underneath this deal that the industry has been reluctant to have. Black-box identity systems are increasingly incompatible with AI-driven enterprises.

As AI becomes more deeply embedded across marketing, commerce, and service operations, enterprises will demand greater visibility into how customer identity is resolved, governed, and operationalised.

Black-box identity systems become harder to justify when customer intelligence is powering automated decisioning at scale.

Brands increasingly want to understand how identity is being resolved, how customer data is governed, whether customer intelligence remains portable across systems, and how AI-driven decisions are being made from that data.

That pressure toward transparency and governance will only intensify as AI agents become more operationally embedded across the enterprise.

Interoperability will become a strategic advantage

One of the most important implications of this acquisition is that ecosystem flexibility itself is becoming strategically valuable.

The future will belong to enterprises that can create a durable customer intelligence foundation once and operationalise it everywhere.

That requires more than a customer database. It requires an enterprise-owned intelligence layer capable of interoperating across cloud environments, media ecosystems, retail networks, identity frameworks, and AI systems without forcing businesses into rigid architectures or closed ecosystems.

This acquisition will accelerate enterprise demand for warehouse-native and composable architectures. Brands that locked themselves into closed ecosystems are already feeling the cost. The ones building on open, portable foundations are better positioned for whatever comes next — whether that is a new AI platform, a new identity framework, or the next acquisition that reshapes the landscape.

The more fragmented the ecosystem becomes, the more valuable neutral orchestration layers become.

The next competitive battle will be won at the intelligence layer

The Publicis-LiveRamp deal is a signal, not an anomaly. The intelligence layer is being consolidated. The only question is whether your enterprise is building one you own, or inheriting one someone else controls.

The companies that win will not be the ones most dependent on a single media or activation ecosystem. They will be the ones that own their customer graph, control their intelligence layer, and preserve the flexibility to orchestrate across whatever partners, channels, and AI systems the future brings.

In the AI era, the customer graph is becoming the operating system for enterprise decisioning.

**

This thought leadership piece is written by Tony Owens, CEO, Amperity.

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Announced during the Amplify 2026 conference, the new release combines customer context, decision-making, and execution into a single system designed to enable faster and more personalised customer engagement.

According to the company, the platform is built around a shared layer of real-time customer context that unifies customer identity, behavior, and historical data to support more immediate decision-making.

The launch comes as brands continue to face challenges in delivering timely and relevant customer experiences despite increased investments in data and artificial intelligence technologies. Amperity said many organisations still struggle to operationalise customer data in real time, resulting in delayed or disconnected interactions with consumers.

“Organisations have invested heavily in customer data and AI, but many still struggle to operationalise those investments in real time,” said Gerry Murray, Research Director for Enterprise Marketing Apps and Agents at IDC. “What we’re seeing is a shift from systems of analysis to systems of analysis and action. Platforms that can connect trusted customer data with real-time decisioning and execution are becoming critical to how marketing and customer experience teams operate.”

Among the newly introduced features is Recommended Actions, which highlights customer trends and suggests actions for teams to execute. The company also introduced the Amperity MCP Server, which allows real-time customer intelligence to be integrated into existing workflows and tools without duplicating data.

Additional capabilities include real-time activation tools designed for in-session personalisation and cart abandonment response, as well as Amp Insights, a feature that provides visibility into platform usage and cost transparency.

Amperity said the system is designed to move beyond static customer journeys and campaign-based approaches by relying on live customer signals to guide decisions.

“Marketing still relies on guessing and reacting after the fact,” said Dr. Grigori Melnik, Chief Product Officer at Amperity. “What we are changing is the ability to know, act, and learn in the same moment. The system no longer waits for a manual command or a ticket; it reasons through intent. That’s what makes it agentic – and what allows teams to move from campaigns to continuous decisions that get smarter over time.”

The company also introduced new real-time solutions for site personalisation and cart abandonment recovery. These tools are intended to help brands recognise customers instantly, convert anonymous visitors into known profiles, personalise experiences during browsing sessions, and trigger recovery actions immediately after abandonment events occur.

Amperity said the new capabilities are built on identity-resolved customer profiles intended to ensure that AI-driven recommendations and actions are based on governed and accurate data. The company added that each action feeds back into the shared customer context layer to create a continuous learning loop aimed at improving future decisions.

According to Amperity, the system is intended to help brands improve customer engagement, reduce manual operational work, accelerate execution, and increase conversion and business returns through more responsive customer interactions.

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Amperity’s footprint in Australia has doubled over the past year, driven by customer wins with leading brands including JB Hi-Fi, Endeavour Group, and Accent Group. As these organisations scale across channels and brands, they rely on Amperity to unify customer data across business units, enabling trusted personalisation, analytics, and activation.

To support this growth, Amperity is now available in both the AWS regions in Australia. By operating within these AWS regions, Amperity enables organisations to keep customer data resident locally while maintaining the performance, scalability, and flexibility required for real-time customer intelligence.

This approach allows enterprises in industries such as airlines, banking, insurance, and telecommunications to unify, govern, and activate customer data within Australia, while supporting advanced analytics, AI-driven use cases, and customer engagement at scale – helping organisations meet local data residency and privacy requirements.

“Australia has become a proving ground for some of our most complex customer data challenges, from strict data residency requirements to large-scale, multi-brand environments,” said Billy Loizou, AVP and General Manager at Amperity. “Expanding our team and making Amperity available in AWS regions in Australia allows us to support customers more closely on the ground and help them turn trusted customer data into real business outcomes.”

Alongside this expansion, Amperity has continued to invest in its local team in Melbourne. The company recently hired Matthew Yip as a Customer Solutions Architect and Uday Gupta as a Services Delivery Manager. These additions strengthen Amperity’s ability to support customers locally as adoption grows across industries and use cases.

The Australian expansion is part of Amperity’s broader strategy to help enterprises move beyond fragmented customer data and build a unified, AI-ready foundation. This enables organisations in the region to personalise, analyse, and act on customer data at scale.

Amperity will host its flagship event, Amplify, on May 6 in New York City, bringing together marketing, data, and technology leaders to explore how AI and customer data are driving measurable business outcomes.

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All these leaders echo the same sentiment that equitable innovation does not happen by accident. It is built intentionally through sponsorship, measurable goals, inclusive product design, flexible work structures and the courage to challenge outdated norms.

Kathy Lu, account manager, client services at Nexxen

International Women’s Day is important to celebrate no matter what industry we are in, it fosters a culture of inclusion, empowering women to speak up and advocate for themselves 

It becomes most poignant in the tech and ad-tech industry, as we are helping to shape the future world we live in. To programmatic media easing the process to selling and buying digital ad spaces, to tools like Meta AI, Galaxy AI ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Apple Intelligence, Claude (and so on and so forth) helping us write better emails and drive better outcomes, advocating for women’s voice amongst the madness is more important than ever.

Equity in innovation means designing systems with fairness, and ensuring AI reflects the diversity and values of the society it serves, where “all are equal before the law”.

I want to look into the future career progression and know I have the rights to equal access, so that women like me can contribute meaningfully without having to justify our presence at every step. 

AI and marketing career pathways

Pip Stocks, founder of the Startup Muse

It’s also important to look at balancing the scales in women’s careers as a whole in the age of AI. AI is removing many traditional entry-level jobs especially the repetitive, process-driven roles that used to be a young person’s way in. Pretending otherwise doesn’t help anyone.

The real question is whether we respond with fear or redesign. We need to stop preparing young women for ladder-based careers and start preparing them to build, direct, and collaborate with AI. 

The future belongs to those who can think critically, create value, and use intelligent systems as leverage, not those waiting for permission to enter through old doors.

Diversity fuels innovation

Georgina Ryan, senior sales manager at Nexxen

Whilst I do believe the gender representation gaps are closing, and women are entering the industry in greater numbers, some long-standing cultural and structural challenges remain.

It would be remiss not to acknowledge the disproportionate challenges the gender diverse

community may face on International Women’s Day and the representation of First Nations women in the industry.

International Women’s Day is important to celebrate in the media, marketing and advertising industry as a whole, as it is imperative that women are represented in an industry which thrives on diverse perspectives. 

Gender-diverse teams can challenge assumptions and design campaigns that resonate with broader audiences. Many women still don’t see obvious entry points into programmatic, data engineering, or platform roles. Highlighting female leaders during IWD makes success visible, which helps normalise women in technical and commercial leadership positions, which is a powerful signal to the next generation.

Tipping the scales and sharing the load

Dr Anna Harrison, founder of RAMMP

“Balance the scales” to me means designing systems, at home and at work, where neither side collapses under assumed obligation.

Women are not underrepresented because they are less capable. They are underrepresented because the total system load is uneven. And that load starts at home.

Someone has to make the children’s sandwiches. Someone has to leave early for school pickup. Someone has to carry the mental inventory of who needs new shoes. As long as that remains coded as “women’s work,” workplace equality will plateau regardless of policy. Real change is creating networking formats that don’t default to masculine-coded rituals and teaching our sons to share the load, and make killer sandwiches.

Collaboration vs Compliance

Fabrizia Roberto, fractional CMO and founder of www.fabriziaroberto.com

Women are often encouraged to be collaborative and consensus-driven, until that collaboration turns into compliance. When women challenge assumptions or hold a firm line, they’re more likely to be labelled “difficult” or “uncollaborative”, rather than decisive.

I’ve experienced this firsthand: being seen as collaborative when I agree and uncollaborative when I don’t – in particular when refusing to say “yes” simply to protect someone else’s ego. That’s not collaboration; that’s appeasement. And it’s a standard rarely applied evenly across genders.

International Women’s Day creates space to name these dynamics out loud and to reset expectations. If marketing and tech truly want better outcomes – better products, stronger brands, more sustainable growth – then they need leaders who can challenge thinking, place smart bets and act with conviction.

How to accelerate change

Bel Lloyd, customer success lead at Amperity

We need to set measurable goals for gender balance, not just in entry-level roles, but in leadership and technical decision-making positions. We also need to Invest in bias awareness and inclusive leadership training so teams understand how to build and nurture truly inclusive environments. This will further encourage businesses and leaders to commit to real action, not just discussion, from inclusive hiring and mentorship programs to addressing bias in how teams and tools are built. 

Ultimately, real change happens when organisations commit to clear, actionable strategies, not just good intentions. And when women support each other to grow, lead and innovate together. 

Change needs proactive energy

Caitlin Stephens, chief of staff APAC at Eagle Eye

Change requires an intentional and proactive approach to ensure women receive access to the same opportunities. Who gets recommended for the stretch assignment? Who gets introduced to the investor? Who gets amplified in a meeting?

One of the most powerful tools I have in leadership is the ability to provide sponsorship, to be someone who highlights and amplifies the talents of women based on their merits and unique perspectives and to back this up with policies, and structures within organisations that aim to remove some of the traditional barriers that can hold them back. Think parental leave, flexibility, Women’s ERGs and our very own “Purple Women” initiative at Eagle Eye, mentorship and leadership development. 

Geoff Main, marketing director/founder at Passionberry Marketing

In marketing, technology and business, 2026 International Women’s Day is not the opportunity for a branding exercise. It poses a systems question.

The logic is straightforward. Fairer systems create better performance. Better performance creates stronger economies. Stronger economies create broader opportunity. And, broader opportunity advances society – for everyone in it.

As Emma Watson put it: “Gender equality is your issue too.” If that’s true, then this isn’t just about intent. It’s about how we hire, source, fund and build.

It’s time we all spoke up about the key issues raised around International Women’s Day, and we had more men contribute to the narrative. Gender Equity is more than a one day social marketing or PR campaign, It is a long term cultural shift that is critical is we want to build progressive systems that in the corporate world, ultimately also build more valuable companies.

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This collaboration brings together flydubai’s customer experience vision with Amperity’s advanced data and intelligence platform to connect traveller insights in real time, enabling deeper personalisation and more meaningful engagement across the entire journey.

Through this partnership, flydubai will have the ability to unify customer data across multiple touchpoints to build a more complete understanding of traveller preferences. The results will provide a strong foundation to flydubai’s road map on Modern Airline Retailing and empower flydubai’s teams to understand customer needs and deliver more relevant offers.

Customer data can be uniquely complex, especially for airlines. Customer Orders span multiple systems, third-party agencies often provide limited information, and many travelers book without loyalty numbers or consistent identifiers. Amperity was chosen because of its proven ability to make sense of that complexity. The platform’s AI-driven identity resolution and airline-specific data model are purpose-built to handle passenger data and connect it in real time across the airline’s operational systems.

“We have carried more than 120 million passengers since 2009, and we welcome millions of passengers every year as our network and fleet continue to grow. By leveraging Amperity, we aim to gain a deeper understanding of our customers’ preferences and behaviours, which will ultimately lead to an overall improved experience at every touchpoint. Partnering with Amperity will enable us to transition to an Offer-Order-based ecosystem and have a unified, data-driven view of flydubai’s customers and deliver more relevant and timely communications that meet their changing travel needs,” said Mohammed Hareb AlMheiri, chief procurement & technology officer at flydubai. 

“We manage all passenger data in line with leading international security standards and the Dubai Electronic Security Centre’s Information Security Regulation (ISR) framework. This ensures that we maintain robust safeguards to preserve the confidentiality and integrity of our systems,” added AlMheiri.

flydubai will use Amperity’s Identity Keychain and multi-index Profile API to unify and retrieve customer data instantly across a wide range of systems, including passenger communications, airport check-in, in-flight recognition, customer service and marketing. This unified customer view will power both personalized engagement and operational excellence.

Today, the airline has built a growing network of more than 135 destinations across 58 countries and is served by a modern and efficient fleet of 97 Boeing 737 aircraft. 

“flydubai is part of a new generation of airlines redefining what it means to be customer-centric,” said Derek Slager, co-founder & CTO at Amperity. “Airlines need a platform that can handle the speed, scale, and data diversity of modern travel. With Amperity, flydubai can use every piece of data, from bookings and loyalty to day-of-travel interactions, to deliver personalised experiences.”

The partnership reflects flydubai’s continued investment in service innovation and digital-led experiences. With Amperity, the airline gains a platform designed for airline-specific use cases that supports marketing, communications, eCommerce, customer experience, and operations teams. 

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The Attribution Challenge

When asked what makes omnichannel attribution so challenging, Hayley Robinson, head of sales & GTM retail media at MixIn, Endeavour Group’s retail media arm, outlined some of the tension that retailers face.

“I think from a retailer perspective, we probably deal with the paradox of, first and foremost, and absolutely paramount, protecting our customer data,” she said. 

“On the flip side, there is also an expectation that we know as consumers that you are serving personalised ads and shopper journeys, making sure you know who they are, when they show up, and what they want to see.”

The scale of the data challenge is staggering. Robinson shared that across Dan Murphy’s and BWS, Endeavour Group generates 185 million shopping trips annually, operates over 1700 physical locations and processes two separate websites generating five million unique visits each week, with the group totalling $10 billion in transactions each year.

“So hopefully that starts to set the scene. We are very passionate about making sure [brands] and our customers have the right experience, the right information, but it is not an easy journey to stitch them all together and make sure that we are doing it in a legal and compliant way. That’s why we have reached out to partners, because we can’t answer all of that on our own,” she said.

Also on the panel was Meredith Lewis-Jones, head of digital & omnichannel connections at Vinarchy Wines, a partner of MixIn already experiencing the benefits of the solution. Lewis-Jones described the complexity that makes attribution sometimes feel impossible from a brand perspective.

“In Endeavour specifically, we’ve got 250-plus [SKUs]. You look at that level of fragmentation from a media buyer perspective, layered with 250 SKUs that are on different trade promotions, different price promotions, different [above-the-line] media being bought, different retail media being bought, different shopper activations,” she 

“When we try to take a step back from a brand POV and look at what lever is driving what, in terms of profit at the end of the day, that becomes a very complicated puzzle to start putting together without any closed-loop attribution.”

How the Solution Works

Solving the retail media attribution puzzle required bringing together multiple distinct capabilities, starting with Amperity’s data unification platform. Bel Lloyd, client lead at Amperity, detailed what makes this solution unprecedented in region.

“This is the first time that these partnerships have come together, and it’s the first in region closed-loop attribution in this area that Amperity has stood up, the first that Criteo has stood up, and first that MixIn has stood up,” she said. 

“Hayley gave you a great rundown of how many data points the Endeavour Group will come across. We then [use our] data unification and identity resolution platform [to] ingest data from all of those touch points from over 40 data sources in a compliance-safe way for them.

“[We then] do the identity resolution at scale to be able to provide the customer IDs and all of the transactional data that’s required for this closed-loop attribution onto Criteo and into Criteo to do the magic linking between what’s been happening in the online advertising world and what’s been happening in terms of transactions in store.”

Perhaps even more impressive than the technical achievement was the speed of delivery. Lloyd highlighted what she sees as a new benchmark for the industry.

“What is new is the agility that MixIn showed as a retail media network. We were able to, from when this project was greenlit, to actually implementing it and giving access to Vinarchy to the self-serve attribution picture, it all happened in just five weeks. So that, for me, has really set a new standard for retail media networks, in being agile and speed to enablement and speed to value.”

Jess Truesdale, client lead for Retail Media at Criteo, explained how this speed advantage extends into ongoing operations.

“We can now, with that great data, enable brands to be able to see activity … down to the SKU-level purchases that happened in store within a couple of days on a self-serve platform, and they can view that with different attribution windows,” she said. 

“They could have a one-day, a 30-day look back, and they can use that to see peak times throughout the week, or peak periods, or when they’ve also got promotions happening in store, and exactly how the online activity has influenced the in store sales, and vice versa.

“What this has enabled is that anybody can access information they need from a brand point of view at the right time, and they can [tailor it to their] specific business needs. 

“There’s no one size fits all. Every retailer is structured differently. All of the buying behaviour changes constantly. So it’s not about doing a bit of a look back after the campaign, it’s about using that information and being able to look at it in almost real-time and making optimisations and changes throughout the campaign, as well as looking at what they can do further ahead.”

Changing the Stakeholder Conversation

For Lewis-Jones at Vinarchy Wines, the impact has been transformational across multiple internal conversations.

“This advancement has been pretty big in our business. It’s really enabled me to have a number of different conversations with different stakeholders in our business. The one interesting one is we’ve got a large category team, and for them this has unlocked a whole new data set that gives them a different level of insight from that sort of digital touch point, to that bridge to in store, which they never had before,” she said. 

“The way we’re looking at our portfolio and looking at SKUs that we previously would say ‘that doesn’t work online, let’s uninvest there’, we are now able to look at and say, ‘you might not sell it online, but someone’s viewing it while they’re in store, purchasing while they’re in store’. We just could never track that before.”

“We then have a pretty happy commercial conversation going on. Part of that for us is our commercial leads aren’t particularly interested in [return on ad spend]. They are interested in profitability, but accessing that data to prove that out with other retail media channels and networks is really challenging.”

The impact on reported performance was dramatic.

“I’m super stoked because our team is being able to change the way that we’re optimising, not just for the 15% of our sales that happen online, but the 100% that’s happening online and in store. If you look at our [performance metrics] … overnight it doubled. [It’s a] ery fun conversation to have with our head of commercial that it’s even more effective than we originally had anticipated.”

The Last Drop

The MixIn, Criteo, and Amperity partnership demonstrates what’s possible when retail media networks prioritise measurement and move quickly. In just five weeks, the three companies delivered the region’s first closed-loop attribution solution at scale, connecting digital advertising to verified in-store sales across Endeavour Group’s retail network.

For launch partner Vinarchy Wines, the results validated the approach. Performance metrics doubled overnight as the solution revealed retail media’s true impact; not just on the 15% of sales happening online, but across the entire portfolio. 

The brand now has SKU-level visibility into how digital campaigns influence in-store purchases, transforming internal conversations with category teams, commercial leads, and finance stakeholders.

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