In-Store Retail Media Central Eastern Europe

In-Store Retail Media in Central Eastern Europe: A Market Without a Playbook

In-store retail media in Central Eastern Europe isn't a forecast for 2028. It's live right now — running on screens inside pan-European chains already operating across the region. If you manage marketing or shopper insights for an FMCG or beauty brand, some of your in-store ad inventory in CEE already exists. You just can't measure it yet.

That's the tension. Foot traffic is there. Screens are there. What most local retailers are missing is the measurement layer — the piece that turns a display into a media product you can sell, buy, and hold accountable. Without it, screens stay a decoration budget instead of a performance channel.

As of mid-2026, no analyst publishes CEE-specific market sizing for in-store retail media. That's not a gap in this article — it's the story. Spend is either bundled into pan-European line items or simply unmeasured, so no one can put a clean number on it. What follows maps what's verifiably live, what the new standards now make possible, and how fast a local retailer can move to catch up.

How Big Is European In-Store Retail Media — and Where Does CEE Fit?

European retail media overall is projected to reach roughly EUR 25 billion by 2026 (Bain, via Ahold Delhaize) and between EUR 28.8 and 31 billion by 2028 (IAB Europe). That's growth of about 21–22% a year — roughly four times faster than the total digital ad market.

The physical-store slice is bigger than most people assume. European in-store retail media spend is estimated at USD 300–400 million, putting it at rough parity with the US despite Europe's smaller overall market (Carrefour case data via Retail Media World). The idea that in-store is a US-first story doesn't hold.

The US trajectory still tells you where this is heading. eMarketer puts US in-store spend at $370 million in 2024, forecast to hit $1.06 billion by 2028, with 45.5% growth in 2025 alone. Europe is on a similar curve. Why no CEE number, then? Measurement is fragmented and there's no standard way to report an impression — so the spend is happening but invisible to analysts.

Pan-European Chains Already Running In-Store Retail Media Across CEE

The retail media playbook is entering CEE from the outside in, through multinational chains that built the model in Western Europe and are now switching on inventory in the East. That matters because it means the market is being shaped by players who already sell to your media buyers.

MediaMarktSaturn: In-Store Retail Media in Central Eastern Europe, Live in Hungary

MediaMarktSaturn rolled out in-store digital signage advertising across around 400 German stores, part of a 627-store European network live in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Luxembourg, Turkey, and the Netherlands — with Switzerland and Spain added and Belgium, Poland, and Italy planned (invidis, November 2024). Hungary is already active, making it one of the earliest verifiable in-store retail media activations in CEE. Poland sits in the planned rollout — a clear signal that CEE screen inventory is coming at scale, not as a pilot.

Schwarz Media and Tesco: The Grocery Angle

Schwarz Media, the retail media arm of Lidl and Kaufland, signed a strategic partnership with The Trade Desk in 2024 and helped write the IAB Europe in-store standards. Both Kaufland and Lidl operate heavily across CEE — so the group shaping the rules also holds the widest regional store footprint.

Tesco Media & Insight, powered by dunnhumby, runs more than 1,000 in-store screens in the UK. Tesco's Central European operations in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary are a logical extension path, though no public rollout timeline has been confirmed. For anyone managing brand relationships, the practical read is straightforward: these are retailers you already work with on loyalty data and digital campaigns. The in-store screen layer is becoming part of that same conversation — a new line in an existing deal, not a new supplier.

The Measurement Gap Blocking In-Store Retail Media Central Eastern Europe from Scaling

The single biggest barrier to in-store retail media investment across Europe — CEE included — is the lack of standardised, verifiable audience measurement. Not screens. Not traffic. Measurement. Specifically: 53% of European buyers name lack of standardisation as their top barrier to spending (IAB Europe 2025, across 31 markets).

A multinational FMCG brand needs metrics that mean the same thing in a Warsaw hypermarket as they do in a Munich store. Right now, they rarely get that. You can see every click on a digital ad — impressions, dwell, bounce. But how many shoppers actually paused in front of that end-cap screen? For most stores, that's a guess. And a guess doesn't get funded twice.

The current baseline across most CEE screen networks is loop-count reporting — how many times a piece of content played. That measures the screen. It says nothing about who was standing in front of it. Dwell time and traffic near a display are the store equivalent of time-on-page; without them, campaign attribution is guesswork dressed as a report.

IAB Europe's In-Store Standards: A Measurement Framework for Central Eastern Europe Retail Media

In December 2024, IAB and IAB Europe published measurement standards for in-store retail media. CEE retailers adopting them now can start with a credible, buyer-recognised framework instead of retrofitting one after buyers have already rejected their loop-count numbers.

The Impression Hierarchy: From Ad Play to Likelihood-to-See

The standards define a four-level impression hierarchy, each step requiring richer data than the last:

1. Ad play — the content played. A screen log, nothing more.
2. Gross impression — a broader count of exposure opportunity.
3. Opportunity to see (OTS) — someone was actually present in the zone. Requires presence detection.
4. Likelihood-to-see — a real person was oriented toward the screen long enough to take it in. Requires facing and dwell measurement.

Likelihood-to-see is the level that changes the conversation. It's the metric that makes an in-store impression comparable to a verified digital one, because it answers the question buyers actually ask: did a real person have a genuine chance to see this?

Sensor-Based Verified-View Measurement: Presence, Facing, and Dwell

Verified-view, under the standards, needs three inputs working together:

• Presence — someone is in the measurement zone near the screen.
• Facing — they're oriented toward the display, not walking past with their back to it.
• Dwell — they stayed long enough to process the message.

A network that adopts this approach skips the loop-count era entirely and offers buyers the same accountability tier they expect from programmatic digital. Pygmalios — a CEE-native in-store analytics company based in Slovakia — reports all three inputs through its ScreenIQ product. There's also a commercial payoff hiding in the dwell data: correlate dwell time near a promotional display with sell-through figures and you start building an attribution model that answers "did the display drive purchase?" with numbers instead of intuition.

What CEE-Native Retailers Need to Build a Competitive In-Store Retail Media Offer

Local CEE retailers — convenience chains, grocery discounters, pharmacies — already have the two hardest things to buy: foot traffic and screen infrastructure. What they're missing is the audience data layer and the commercial packaging to sell it to brands. Three things close that gap:

1. Sensor-based audience measurement at screen level, aligned to the IAB Europe standards, so an impression means the same thing to a buyer in Prague as it does in Paris.
2. A campaign reporting dashboard that speaks in digital-marketing KPIs — impressions, reach, dwell, conversion lift — not screen uptime.
3. A standardised rate card that lets buyers compare your inventory directly against Western European inventory.

CEE-native retailers aren't absent from retail media broadly. Żabka in Polish convenience, Rohlik in Czech online grocery, and Allegro in the Polish marketplace are all active. Public documentation of their in-store screen offerings is still thin, so the in-store layer reads as the next logical step rather than something already built at scale.

For the person making the case internally: the pitch to your CFO changes completely when you can show impression data with the same rigour as a programmatic campaign. In-store stops being a "brand feel" line item and becomes a measurable performance channel you can defend, scale, and repeat. Western European retailers spent years on proprietary metrics that buyers eventually refused to trust. CEE retailers don't have to repeat that cycle — going straight to verified-view wins budget from FMCG brands actively hunting for accountable in-store inventory.

Sources

• IAB Europe — Retail Media Hub — European retail media sizing, the 53% standardisation barrier, and the December 2024 in-store measurement standards.
• Ahold Delhaize (Bain data) — European retail media projected at ~EUR 25B by 2026.
• invidis (November 2024) — MediaMarktSaturn in-store digital signage network, 627 European stores including live Hungary and planned Poland.
• The Trade Desk — Schwarz Media (Lidl/Kaufland) strategic partnership announcement, 2024.
• dunnhumby / Tesco Media & Insight — 1,000+ in-store screens in the UK.
• eMarketer — US in-store retail media forecasts, $370M (2024) to $1.06B (2028).
• Retail Media World (Carrefour case data) — European in-store spend estimate of USD 300–400M.