What Shoptalk Spring 2026 revealed about retail customer data

With imagino being a relatively new (but highly disruptive) entrant to the U.S. market, we’ve been on the road to meet as many potential customers as possible. The team has already ticked off half-a-dozen shows so far this year, and Shoptalk Spring 2026 in Las Vegas was the latest event we headed along to.

Everyone who’s visited the city has their own view of Vegas. Glitz, glamour and maybe some gambling might be on the agenda for many, but we were very much in business mode. That said, with the event being held at the Mandalay Bay conference center, we definitely felt a bit of the authentic Vegas vibe.

Thousands of retailers attend Shoptalk Spring. It’s impossible to meet them all, of course, and given imagino’s strengths, we were tightly focused on meeting enterprise scale retailers. Multi-billion-dollar companies with multi-millions of customers, representing, in theory, the cutting edge of customer marketing and engagement. And yet…

Huge scale can mean big issues

The story is the same as my colleagues around the world find whenever they speak to retailers: their marketing team finds it difficult to leverage the company’s data to engage customers.

As you’d expect, there’s no shortage of technology in place within such established and mature retail organizations. May have already implemented both a Customer Data Platform (CDP) and a Customer Engagement Platform (CEP), though not always from the same vendor. The relative performance of these two platforms is often inconsistent, creating issues. Poor performance in either one inevitably weakens the performance of the other.

Compounding the issue, the CDP approach is increasingly seen as dated – a bygone of an earlier technological age. Switching to a new approach can, however, seem like a risk.

Shoptalk highlighted a change in sentiment. While an organization’s data and IT team can often find itself in conflict with the marketing operation, there’s an awareness from the former that they need to be providing data to marketing colleagues that can be trusted, and ensuring that it can be put to use in an agile way. Previous approaches aren’t fit for purpose.

The lightbulb moment

Despite the maturity of these retailers, there’s often a lack of awareness that a radical new approach exists. When introducing imagino’s approach to retailers, it’s interesting to see when the ‘lightbulb moment’ arrives (and there always is one). 

For some, the mere mention of ‘zero copy’ piques their interest, prompting an almost palpable sense of relief. For others, a deeper dive into how we can help them activate data from any source, wherever it is, entices them to dig further. Before long, their mental cogs are whirring with the possibilities this creates, and the new use cases it unlocks. 

Customer data previously unused or inaccessible can be immediately put to work. To this point, if a retailer already holds data tables in Snowflake or Microsoft, the timeline to showing the benefits of imagino can be mere days.

Nothing beats face-to-face

The technology industry can often be its own worst enemy. Tech speak, jargon, conflicting messages, and everyone claiming to have found the solution. For customers it can be difficult to distil the fact from the marketing fiction. 

Show, tell, demonstrate, and prove is our mantra. Doing so face-to-face at an event like Shoptalk Spring is an effective way to do so at scale. It’s why you can safely bet we won’t stop road tripping for a while yet.