Dick's Sporting Goods is working with LiveRamp and Adobe to build the creative capabilities of its retail media business, Adweek reported, a move that ties one of the largest US sporting goods retailers to two of the most widely deployed stacks in adtech and creative production.

The partnership connects three layers of the retail media workflow. Dick's brings the audience and inventory. LiveRamp brings identity resolution and data connectivity. Adobe brings the creative toolchain that brands and agencies already use to produce campaign assets at scale.

What does this change for retail media practitioners?

For brand and agency teams, the practical question is whether retail media creative moves closer to the production pipeline they already run. Retail media networks have historically demanded bespoke asset formats, sizes and retailer-specific specifications, forcing creative teams into manual rework for each channel.

Pulling Adobe's creative tooling into the retail media workflow, with LiveRamp's identity infrastructure underneath, signals an attempt to standardize that process. Advertisers working with Dick's media network would, in principle, produce and deliver creative through a connected stack rather than a patchwork of retailer portals and manual handoffs.

For Dick's itself, the move positions its retail media business to compete for brand budgets that increasingly demand:

• Automated, scalable creative production tied to retailer data
• Identity infrastructure that connects retailer audiences to advertiser systems
• Measurement that closes the loop between ad exposure and purchase

Why the identity layer matters here

LiveRamp's role is the connective tissue. Its clean room and identity resolution products let retailers share audience data with brands without moving raw customer records. For a retailer like Dick's, which sits on high-intent purchase data from loyalty and transaction programs, that identity layer is what turns first-party data into sellable, targetable media inventory.

Adobe's role sits on the production and experience side. Its Creative Cloud and Experience Cloud products are already standard issue at most large brands and agencies. Integrating retail media execution with those tools reduces friction for the advertisers a retail media network most wants to attract: those with mature creative operations and large budgets.

The bigger picture for retail media

Retail media has grown into one of the fastest-expanding ad channels, and retailers across categories have been racing to professionalize their offerings. The first wave of that buildout focused on inventory, auctions and sales teams. The current wave is moving up the stack into creative, data collaboration and automated campaign production.

A partnership of this shape — retailer, identity provider, creative platform — is a template for how that second wave is likely to look. Retail media networks that require advertisers to rebuild workflows from scratch will struggle against those that plug into existing adtech and creative infrastructure.

For martech practitioners at brands, the development is worth tracking on three fronts:

• Whether Dick's retail media network exposes Adobe-connected creative workflows to external advertisers, not just internal teams
• How LiveRamp-based data collaboration is positioned against clean room alternatives already common in retail media deals
• Whether the arrangement becomes a reference architecture other retailers copy

Adweek's report frames the effort as building retail media's creative future — a signal that the retailer sees creative production, not just inventory, as the next competitive battleground for media budgets.

The deal's specifics — scope, rollout timing and which advertiser capabilities ship first — will determine whether it changes day-to-day practice or stays a strategic announcement.

By Tom Whitfield