Retail media is growing faster than the confidence of the people paying for it. In a 2026 NIQ and Unlimitail survey, 67% of surveyed CMOs said they plan to spend more on retail media, while only 53% consider their networks' measurement and attribution adequate for reliable incrementality measurement. The public summary gives no sample size or geography, so treat it as a mood.
The mood is the same on the other side of the Atlantic. AAM, citing a 2026 ANA member survey, reports that 55% of marketers named the lack of measurement standardization as their number one barrier to evaluating retail media performance. The phrase that keeps coming up on LinkedIn this month is that retail media grades its own homework. The network runs the ad and reports the result.
In Europe the in-store part of that business is mostly invisible in the statistics. Retail media grew 16.7% to EUR 13.3bn in 2025 according to the IAB Europe AdEx Benchmark, and that figure, by IAB Europe's own definition, excludes in-store and off-site retail media. WARC Media forecasts global retail media investment of USD 200.4 billion in 2026, 15.2% of worldwide ad spend. The store, where most of the shopping still happens, is a footnote in both numbers.
Nobody can compare the numbers
There is a reason, and it is boring: nobody can compare the numbers. A screen network reports plays. A brand wants to know how many people were there, how many could have seen the ad, and how many actually did. The IAB and IAB Europe in-store standards give those four things different names: an ad play, a gross impression, an opportunity to see and a likelihood to see. A screen that played is not a person who saw. IAB Europe is now laying the groundwork for an In-Store Retail Media Certification on top of those metrics, after a measurement workshop this summer that also asked whether dwell time should be measured per store zone instead of for the whole store.
For a retailer planning screens, this turns one purchasing question into four. Which of the four numbers will you be able to show a brand next year? Plays come from the player. Gross impressions need a count of people in the zone. Opportunity to see needs the zone drawn around the screen, and likelihood to see needs a sensor that can tell whether the ad was in someone's field of view. Most networks we have looked at in Central Europe can show the first number and are guessing at the other three.
A question to answer before the first screen
Our view is that this is a question to answer before the first screen is bought, because the answer changes where the screens go and what the rate card can promise. That is what the Pygmalios In-store Media Readiness Assessment does: one store, four to six weeks, a verdict on which of those four numbers the store can produce today and what it would take to produce the rest. We measure people and zones anonymously, and we don't build ad servers.
If the certification lands, the networks that can show all four numbers will be the ones the budget moves to. The others will keep selling screens on reputation.
Sources
- NIQ, Measure retail media incrementality and prove impact, July 2026 (NIQ and Unlimitail survey, June 2026)
- Alliance for Audited Media on the ANA report Retail Media Measurement Standardization, August 2026
- IAB Europe, AdEx Benchmark 2025
- WARC Media, The Future of Commerce Media 2026, via MM+M, August 2026
- IAB and IAB Europe, In-Store Retail Media Definitions and Measurement Standards, December 2024
- IAB Europe, In-Store Measurement Workshop key takeaways, July 2026