By: Emma Helsloot
Vanessa knows the French market like the back of her hand – and she’s using that insider lens to help shape the future of retail media across Europe. With roots in JCDecaux and Epsilon, and now leading Unlimitail’s growth in France, she’s turning local depth into continental strategy. As WRMC’s Community Connector for France, Vanessa shares her perspective on building trust, bridging data with experience, and why France isn’t just a market – it’s the blueprint.
Unlimitail is a relatively new player in the retail media space, but already operating at scale across Europe. What motivated you to take on the challenge of developing its retail media offering, and how have your past experiences influenced your approach in the French market?
Joining Unlimitail was more than a career move – it marked a pivotal strategic shift. From the very first conversations, it was obvious: this was a once-in-a-decade opportunity to build something from the ground up, with the backing of Carrefour, the precision of Epsilon, and the ambition to redefine Retail Media across Europe. Being part of its creation from day one – shaping the vision, building the partnerships, assembling the teams – was an opportunity I knew I couldn’t pass up. It was a no-brainer, yes, but more than that, it felt like the natural culmination of everything I’d done so far.
My time at Epsilon gave me a deep foundation in data-led marketing, people-based identity, and retail media monetization before it even became a buzzword. I had early exposure to what true 1st-party data activation could look like and I saw the untapped potential it held for retailers.
Before that, my experience at JCDecaux Airport in Travel Retail taught me how to tell brand stories in physical, high-impact environments, how to turn traffic into attention, and attention into influence.
Retail media sits precisely at the intersection of those two worlds: data precision and brand experience. And in a market like France – where retail sophistication and media maturity both run deep – that dual lens has been critical. I came into Unlimitail with a clear mission: to bridge media logic with retail impact, and to build long-term, high-trust partnerships that move the industry forward.
This felt like the right company at precisely the right moment to help shape the next chapter of retail media in Europe.
France has one of the most mature grocery and FMCG sectors in Europe. In your view, what makes the French market uniquely positioned – or uniquely challenging – for retail media growth compared to other regions Unlimitail operates in?
France stands out as more than just another market – it’s a hub for pressure-tested innovation. It challenges every assumption. The scale and complexity of its FMCG landscape, the strength of its retail giants like Carrefour, and the sophistication of its advertisers mean that nothing less than excellence is acceptable. You can’t fake it here, France forces you to deliver media solutions that are not only high-performing, but deeply embedded into retail operations. That’s what makes it so powerful and so strategically important.
For us at Unlimitail, France acts as a strategic engine room. The demands of this market push us to invent faster, refine deeper, and deliver smarter. But here’s the real value: everything we solve for in France becomes a blueprint for broader European success. The frameworks we co-develop with French partners – around attribution, measurement, data governance – can be scaled across markets like Germany, the UK, Spain, and the Netherlands, where the momentum is building.
In short, France isn’t just where we operate: it’s where we lead, stress-test, and sharpen our edge. It’s not a challenge: it’s our competitive advantage.
Unlimitail works with a wide network of retailers across Europe. How are you leveraging first-party data from French retailers like Carrefour to help brands build more relevant and privacy-conscious connections with shoppers?
At Unlimitail, we go far beyond simply using retailer data – we unlock its full strategic value. What sets us apart is our ability to transform first-party data into a precision-grade media engine: scalable, measurable, and fully privacy-safe. The key to that is Epsilon’s Core ID, arguably one of the most advanced identity technologies in the industry today.
Unlike cookie-based or probabilistic models, Core ID gives us deterministic, persistent, and cross-device identity resolution, allowing us to reach real individuals, at scale, with unmatched accuracy. But here’s where it goes further: Core ID is natively embedded into our onsite platform. This isn’t a bolt-on, it’s the spine of everything we do, powering targeting, activation, and most critically, true unified measurement across both onsite and offsite.
And we’re not stopping at ROAS. We’re delivering the metrics that actually move businesses forward: incrementality, New-to-Brand rates, Customer Lifetime Value, and full omnichannel attribution, tying real in-store purchases back to media exposure with surgical clarity.
All of this is built within a GDPR-compliant, retailer-controlled framework, where our partners like Carrefour maintain full control over their data assets. That’s what makes this future-proof, and what gives our brands confidence to invest, scale, and innovate with us.
We’re not talking about retail media as it used to be. This is a reimagined model: intelligent, identity-powered, and built for long-term growth – for brands, for retailers, and most importantly, for shoppers.
In-store engagement is still central to the French shopper’s journey. How does Unlimitail balance digital retail media innovation with physical store experiences, especially within Carrefour’s footprint in France?
At Unlimitail, our philosophy is phygital by design – not as a buzzword, but as a foundational principle that drives everything we build across Europe. In France, where the store remains a critical brand theatre, we don’t just adapt digital to fit the physical, we elevate the store as a true media channel: integrated, measurable, and creatively impactful.
We’re redefining what in-store can do. Our Person-First Identity powered by Epsilon’s Core ID makes us the only player in the market with native in-store attribution fully embedded into our platform. We can track real, individual transactions in-store and tie them directly to online media exposure. For brick-and-mortar retailers like Carrefour, this is a game-changer: it finally puts physical stores on equal footing with e-commerce in terms of measurement, proving their value in driving omnichannel sales.
We’re also building the first self-service in-store retail media platform: from asset libraries and proposal generation to uplift reports based on store-level transactional data. Our focus goes beyond activation: we believe the most strategic levers for in-store are in pre-sales intelligence and precise measurement. That’s why we’re investing in robust data infrastructure, with MVPs already live in Brazil and rollouts planned for our European markets by year-end.
This isn’t innovation for its own sake: it’s about unlocking the full potential of retail environments as real-time, insight-driven, outcome-oriented media ecosystems.
You’re building a pan-European media network from a base of regional strength. How do you ensure Unlimitail’s growth across France remains locally authentic – while still aligning with a broader international strategy?
At Unlimitail, we don’t believe in copy-paste strategies. We lead with local depth and global ambition – and that’s exactly what sets us apart. Our federated model is a strategic engine: we embed world-class media and data expertise centrally, while empowering each market to adapt with surgical precision.
In France, we co-design retail media programs that are tailored down to the category, format, and shopper behavior – yet everything we build here feeds into a larger European ecosystem. The learnings from France inform our work in Germany, the UK, Spain, or the Netherlands – and vice versa. We’re not just scaling media; we’re scaling intelligence, outcomes, and influence across borders.
More importantly, we bring cross-industry maturity into retail media, leveraging performance standards, identity frameworks, and operational rigor from the most advanced sectors. This allows us to turbocharge our retailer partners’ growth, fast-track adoption, and attract global advertisers with confidence.
Rather than enforcing uniformity, we intentionally raise the bar in each market – with France as both a flagship and a laboratory for innovation.
Final usual question from us: which women working in the retail media industry inspire you and why?
The truth is, we’re surrounded by exceptional women in retail media, especially here in France – and that in itself is deeply inspiring. If I had to highlight just a few, I’d start with Catherine Barba. While not directly in retail media, she’s been a trailblazer in digital commerce and a relentless advocate for women in tech. Through initiatives like La Journée de la Femme Digitale, she’s pushed the industry forward with courage, clarity, and heart.
But what inspires me most on a daily basis is the next generation of leadership already within our ecosystem. At Unlimitail and Epsilon, I have the privilege of working alongside incredible women like Alexandra Duvivier, Elise Marraud des Grottes, and Cécile Barzic-Huet. They bring more than expertise – they bring energy. They lead with both ambition and empathy, they solve fast, think big, and build trust under pressure. What they all have in common? A mindset that’s both resilient and relentlessly positive.
In a sector as fast-moving and high-stakes as retail media, that kind of leadership is not just inspiring: it’s essential.
Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/women-in-retail-media-collective/
About us: The Women in Retail Media Collective (WRM Collective) is an industry-first network dedicated to empowering women in the retail media sector. By providing resources, thought leadership, and community, WRM Collective creates pathways for women to lead, innovate, and drive change in this booming sector. Founded by two industry leaders, WRM Collective is committed to fostering a more inclusive and equitable retail media landscape. For more information visit www.wrmcollective.com.