US in-store retail media grew 45.5% in 2025 — more than double the pace of overall US retail media — yet most of it still gets measured by whether a screen played a file, not whether a single human being looked at it. That gap sits at the heart of the opportunity to see vs verified view in-store retail media measurement debate, and it's exactly where the channel loses credibility as a performance investment. You can tell a brand partner that your aisle screen "delivered 40,000 impressions." But if that number only confirms the media loop ran, you haven't proven anyone watched.
For anyone accountable for marketing spend or in-store insights, this matters. You already know your online click-through rate down to the decimal. Walk into your own store and the picture goes dark — you can't say how many shoppers passed a display, faced it, or paused. Two endpoints on the measurement scale explain the whole problem: Opportunity to See (OTS), which says a screen was in range of foot traffic, and a Verified View, which confirms directed attention while a specific creative played.
In-Store Retail Media Is Growing — Opportunity to See vs Verified View Measurement Hasn't Kept Up
The money is arriving fast. US in-store retail media reached $370M in 2024, grew 45.5% in 2025 — more than double the 20.2% growth of overall US retail media — and is forecast to hit $1.06B by 2028, according to eMarketer. That's a channel accelerating well ahead of the broader market.
Now the awkward part. More than 80% of retail sales still happen in physical stores, yet in-store captured only about 3.3% of US non-Amazon retail media spend in 2025. Read those two figures together and you get a demand-versus-execution gap: the commercial opportunity is obvious, but the proof — the measurement — is lagging.
Europe tells the same story. Retail media there is forecast to reach roughly EUR 25B by 2026 (Bain) and EUR 28.8–31B by 2028 (IAB Europe), with in-store spend around USD 300–400M — close to parity with the US. Same growth curve, same measurement deficit.
53% of European Buyers Name Standardisation as Their Top Barrier
Ask buyers what's holding them back and they'll tell you. In IAB Europe's 2025 research, 53% of European buyers named lack of standardisation as the primary barrier to investing in in-store retail media. Not a fringe complaint — the single biggest one.
Measurement also dominates how buyers choose partners. The same study ranks the top selection criteria as:
- ROAS — demanded by 88% of buyers
- Transparency — 82%
- Performance — 76%
- Measurement options — 75%
Line those numbers up and the message is blunt. Without a measurement standard you can trust, you can't prove in-store campaign ROI, and you can't set an in-store number next to a digital CPM and defend it. That's the budget-justification wall this whole discussion runs into.
The Impression Ladder: Where Opportunity to See Sits and Why It Falls Short
Four rungs separate a logged ad play from a confirmed human view. The IAB and MRC defined them in a shared framework published in January 2024 and finalised in December 2024 — and understanding which rung a vendor reports on tells you exactly what you're buying.
- Ad play — the player logged that the creative ran. Says nothing about people.
- Gross impression — people were present in the store zone while the ad played.
- Opportunity to See (OTS) — people were positioned so they could have seen the screen. This is where most in-store reporting stops today.
- Likelihood to See (LTS) — a modelled estimate of who probably viewed. Still a model, not a measurement.
Why does reporting stop at OTS so often? Because it's what existing footfall sensors can produce. Count the people near a screen zone, confirm the ad ran, and you've got an OTS number. What that number doesn't do is confirm anyone faced the screen or paused long enough to register it.
What the IAB Standard Actually Says About Confirmed Viewing
The standard is refreshingly honest about its own limits. It describes in-store viewability as "an opportunity-to-see, rather than confirmation that someone has seen the ad." That's the industry conceding, in writing, that confirmed viewing is still open ground.
It goes further. The digital viewability thresholds many buyers assume apply — 50% of pixels in view for 1 to 2 seconds — are flagged as potentially wrong for in-store screens, pending further study. A shopper glancing at a checkout display behaves nothing like a browser tab.
One more thing worth probing in any RFP: these standards are voluntary and method-agnostic. A vendor can be "aligned with" IAB guidance without being "IAB-compliant" — there's no such certification. The standard also defines five store zones where OTS gets calculated: exterior, entrance, checkout, aisles, and other. Ask which of those a vendor actually measures.
Likelihood to See: A Model, Not a Measurement
LTS tries to close the gap by applying a multiplier to OTS — a statistical estimate of how many people probably looked. Useful as a directional signal, but not sensor-confirmed data.
The practical trap: two vendors using different LTS models for the same screen, in the same store zone, will report different "impressions." That makes cross-retailer comparison impossible — you're comparing assumptions, not audiences. It recreates the exact blind spot you already feel on attribution: did the campaign drive the uplift, or was it something else? LTS gives you a plausible answer without letting you verify it.
What a Verified View Measures — and What It Enables for In-Store Retail Media Measurement
Where OTS stops at proximity, a Verified View goes three steps further: it confirms a person was present, facing the screen, and dwelling while a specific creative played — reported per screen, per daypart, per creative. That's the term Pygmalios uses in its ScreenIQ methodology, and the precision is the point.
OTS confirms proximity to a screen zone. A Verified View confirms directed attention during the moment the ad was on screen. One tells you people were nearby; the other tells you people watched.
That shift changes the questions you can ask. Instead of "how many people were in the aisle?" you get to ask "how many people watched this creative, at this screen, at 11am on a Tuesday?" Once your data answers that, in-store media starts behaving like a channel you can actually manage.
How Verified View Data Changes Campaign Optimisation and Path-to-Purchase Analysis
Dwell time by zone and daypart stops being trivia and becomes a planning tool. A checkout screen at 5pm might hold far more verified attention than a mid-aisle screen at 10am — and now you can prove which, then buy accordingly rather than spreading budget evenly across screens that don't perform evenly.
Creative testing arrives in-store for the first time. With verified view rates broken out by creative variant, you can run the same A/B logic you already use on digital display — swap the message, watch the attention numbers, keep the winner.
Layer verified view data onto your zone maps and you can also see which physical touchpoints genuinely capture attention before a purchase decision, not just which ones sit in a busy corridor.
Pricing and Commercial Logic: Why Verified View Data Moves CPMs
Unmeasured inventory — or inventory reported on loop-plays alone — trades at a discount, because buyers price for uncertainty. Trusted per-screen audience numbers change that. They let retailers price by zone and daypart instead of selling everything at one flat rate.
Consider the spread. Industry estimates put in-store digital CPMs anywhere from $10 to $50. That range reflects measurement uncertainty as much as genuine audience quality — nobody can price precisely on data they can't verify. Confirmed viewing narrows the guesswork and gives you a defensible number to put in front of a brand partner.
It also creates a common currency. Verified view data lets buyers weigh in-store inventory against programmatic digital or digital out-of-home on a like-for-like basis — which is exactly the comparison the budget-justification problem demands.
Privacy-Safe Camera Measurement: How Verified View Works Without Storing a Single Image
Confirmed viewing doesn't mean cameras are recording shoppers. Anonymous-by-design measurement is built so that nothing identifiable ever leaves the sensor — processing happens on-device, in real time, and only aggregate statistics come out the other side.
In practice, that means:
- No images or video are stored
- No individual is identified
- No biometric templates are created
- Only aggregate statistics leave the device
Under GDPR, this approach isn't classified as special-category biometric data when there's no unique-identification purpose. It's typically processed under legitimate interest, supported by a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) and clear in-store signage disclosing that measurement is taking place.
One caution: interpretation varies by jurisdiction. The Dutch data protection authority takes the strictest stance in Europe, so any deployment should be reviewed market by market rather than assumed uniform across the EU.
What to Ask a Vendor Before Accepting an "Impressions" Report
Every "impressions" number sits somewhere on that four-rung ladder. Work out which rung before you accept the figure — and put these questions into every RFP:
- Is this an ad-play count, a gross impression, an OTS, an LTS model, or a sensor-confirmed verified view?
- Is the methodology documented and auditable — or a black box?
- Which of the five store zones are measured, and how?
- Exactly which elements of the January 2024 / December 2024 IAB standards does the methodology satisfy?
That last question matters because alignment is voluntary. "Aligned with IAB" can cover a lot of ground, so make vendors specify what their approach actually does. The 53% of buyers who name standardisation as their primary barrier are the same people who need to push on this — that's how the standard gets teeth.
Opportunity to See vs Verified View: A Decision Framework for In-Store Retail Media Measurement
OTS isn't wrong. It's limited — and there are cases where it's enough:
- Awareness-only campaigns where reach is the goal
- Early-stage evaluation of a new screen network
- Markets where sensor infrastructure is still thin
A Verified View becomes necessary when the stakes rise:
- Creative testing across variants
- Daypart and zone optimisation
- Cross-channel ROAS reporting
- CPM negotiation with brand partners
Treat this as a progression, not a binary switch. Start with OTS to set baseline traffic benchmarks, then layer in verified view data as your campaigns get more sophisticated and your partners demand harder proof.
The strategic case ties back to the gap at the top of this piece. In-store holds more than 80% of retail sales but takes only about 3.3% of non-Amazon US retail media spend. That gap closes when measurement credibility finally matches the channel's real reach — and a Verified View is the mechanism that makes the case defensible.
Sources
- eMarketer — US in-store retail media forecasts and growth data
- IAB In-Store Retail Media Standards — impression ladder, viewability definitions, store zones (Dec 2024)
- IAB Europe Attitudes to Retail Media 2025 — standardisation barrier and partner-selection criteria
- Bain via Ahold Delhaize newsroom — European retail media forecast
- EDPB Guidelines 3/2019 — processing of personal data through video devices