When people talk about commerce media, they tend to default to platforms, formats and adtech – screens, pipes, dashboards. But at CES 2026, the more interesting story was coming from a retailer that doesn’t neatly fit into any one of those boxes.
Ulta Beauty CMO Kelly Mahoney
Ulta Beauty is, at the same time, a physical retailer, a direct-to-consumer business, a loyalty engine, a content producer, a retail media network and a steward of more than 600 third-party brands. That complexity is not accidental. It’s strategic.
We caught up with Ulta Beauty CMO Kelly Mahoney at CES 2026, where she appeared on The Drum’s Commerce Media Gold Rush panel, to unpack how the business is holding all of those roles together – and what it means for the future of marketing when a retailer starts to look, behave and think like a media company.
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Mahoney is clear that Ulta’s foundations matter. The business is not trying to bolt media on to retail as an afterthought.
“Ulta Beauty is a specialty retailer that focuses on beauty,” she said on stage. “We have 1,500 locations across the United States – those are our experience centres. That’s where you come in, test and try beauty, which is core of what we do. And then we have a thriving dotcom business and now a marketplace.”
That marketplace expansion, particularly into wellness, is not a departure from Ulta’s core identity. It’s an extension of it.
“Beauty is wellness and wellness is beauty,” Mahoney said. “Ulta Beauty has a real credible ability to present wellness to our customer as the next way to beauty.”
Where Ulta really separates itself, though, is in how it understands its customers – and how long it has been doing so.
“46 million members are in our loyalty program,” she said. “95% of all of our sales come from those members.”
That scale of first-party data is not new to Ulta. Mahoney joined the business a decade ago specifically to build and evolve its loyalty infrastructure.
“Back then, we were really focused on the purchase,” she said. “Now we’re focused on what more we can ascertain around attention, motivation and occasion.”
Ulta runs a fast-growing retail media business, but Mahoney is wary of the label. “With the data at the center of everything we do, how could I not think about that? But I’d reframe it slightly. I think about our retail media network as a relationship engine.”
That distinction matters. Ulta is not positioning its media offer as another place to spend money, but as a way to make brand messages feel relevant – and earned.
“We try to talk to our brand partners about not thinking of this as just another way to place dollars,” she said. “Let’s not just slap our logo. This isn’t a logo slap.”
Instead, the pitch is context. “What we can offer is context around who the consumer is, what motivates them. When a product shows up in a piece of creative, it’s going to come across with a high degree of relevance. It’s not going to feel random.”
In that sense, Ulta behaves less like a traditional publisher and more like an editor, deciding not just what appears, but why it appears, where and for whom.
This is where the CMO role becomes uniquely complex. Ulta must build its own brand while helping hundreds of others grow inside its ecosystem.
“We’re a branded house of many other people’s brands,” Mahoney said. “600 brands choose to do business with us and they count on us for growth and differentiation.”
That creates tension – but also opportunity. “It’s equally important that we’re helping those brands carve out spaces to shine inside the context of what makes us special. When you put their brand in context with our purpose and what we know about the customer, that’s where the magic happens.”
That balance – between Ulta’s own identity and its responsibility to partners – is increasingly central to modern retail leadership. The retailer is no longer just a shelf. It’s a curator, a signal amplifier and, increasingly, a storyteller.
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Much of the CES conversation centred on AI, but Mahoney’s view was pragmatic rather than evangelical. “AI is a team sport,” she said. “My job requires me to work very closely with our CIO and our CFO, because implementing data, technology and AI is an always-on investment. It’s not a waterfall.”
Ulta has already seen returns. “I feel like we’ve proven that at Ulta Beauty over the last couple of years. The question isn’t whether it produces a return. It’s where you place the bet.”
Her ambition is not flashy automation, but quiet scale. “I hope that a year from now, AI is quietly powering almost all the repeatable things we do,” she said in our one-to-one. “So humans can really think about purpose, meaning and what motivates the guest.”
That philosophy extends to discovery, where Ulta is watching the rise of agentic AI closely.
“Discovery is the fun part of beauty,” Mahoney said. “Agents are going to become people’s beauty best friend. We can’t control how brands show up in social or LLMs, but we can influence and shape it.”
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Mahoney’s background (10 years in finance before moving into loyalty and performance marketing) shapes how she sees the future of the role.
“Marketers are growth architects. We need to understand the numbers and how we’re a key ingredient in the growth machine.”
That hybrid skillset is no longer optional. “The future CMO needs to understand data, technology and adaptability, just as much as brand and creativity. It’s not about choosing one or the other.”
And that, perhaps, is Ulta Beauty’s clearest lesson. In a world where retail, media, content and commerce are collapsing into one another, relevance doesn’t come from specialising harder. It comes from integrating better.
Or, as Mahoney put it on stage at CES: “You’re not building a funnel any more. You’re building an ecosystem.”
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