The Q&A brings together three industry leaders from our Retail & Commerce Media Committee to unpack what 2026 holds for Retail and Commerce Media. All agree the year will be pivotal: rapid market expansion, rising competition, and the blurring of Retail Media with search and programmatic will force retailers to differentiate through stronger collaboration, modernised infrastructure, and clearer value propositions.
AI emerges as a transformative force - not just for optimisation, but for reshaping the entire commerce layer, from automated operations to real‑time personalisation and even AI‑driven shopping decisions. Success will depend on retailers building trusted, interoperable data and tech foundations that allow AI to enhance the full customer journey.
Measurement remains the industry’s biggest hurdle and greatest opportunity. Progress hinges on shared definitions, aligned reporting frameworks, and cross‑stakeholder cooperation to build transparency, comparability, and confidence, especially around incrementality.
Looking ahead, the wish list of each leader centres on integration, collaboration, and maturity: unified omnichannel planning, stronger data partnerships, simpler tech, and a more committed buy‑side. If Europe can align around these priorities, it has the potential to set the global benchmark for a connected, accountable, and creatively ambitious retail media ecosystem.
A big thank you to the following contributors for sharing their thoughts:
Ollie Shayer, Sr Director, Global Strategy and Innovation, SMG
Lucie Laurendon, Product Marketing Director - Supply and Emerging Channels, Equativ
Lars Djuvik, CRO, Pentaleap
Ollie: “2026 will be a defining year for Retail Media. The market will continue to grow at pace, both in investment and in the volume of networks entering the space. That expansion brings enormous opportunity, but also a real challenge around differentiation. Retailers will need to move beyond capability checklists to articulate what makes their proposition truly distinctive. Success will depend on the ability to collaborate, to build meaningful partnerships with brands and agencies that focus less on channels and more on creating value together. The next phase of growth will come from clarity, creativity, and genuine collaboration.”
Lucie: “The coming year presents a critical turning point for the Retail Media industry. Omnichannel is not yet real and doesn’t deliver its promise to truly anchor the unified customer journey, as on-site, off-site, in-store, and CTV are managed by separate teams and tools.
But opportunities are strong as Retail Media is expected to continue growing fast in spend and networks in 2026. Retailers should collaborate on shared frameworks and definitions. Tech providers can support them with packaged offers to activate and leverage first-party data and unified reporting for omnichannel campaign visibility.
Off-site is becoming key to grow beyond the main point of purchase. It can expand faster with simpler tech and data activation. With AI coming into the market and the impact it may have on on-site traffic, off-site becomes an even stronger opportunity. It lets retailers reach their audiences everywhere and prepare for new behaviours. Many new formats are emerging, especially video and shoppable formats, which offer opportunities to drive performance and create differentiation.”
Lars: “I see the central challenge and opportunity for 2026 being the critical convergence of Retail Media, search, and programmatic channels, driven by intense market saturation and the proliferation of RMNs. For retailers to capitalise, they must move decisively to modernise their ad infrastructure. One way to do this is to shift away from legacy ad servers toward Real-Time Bidding (RTB)-native, lightning-fast solutions. These platforms must be engineered to fluidly accept unified demand from every possible avenue, including direct sales, proprietary APIs, and open programmatic exchanges, ensuring retailers capture budgets wherever advertisers choose to buy.”
Ollie: “AI will play a fundamental role in shaping the next phase of Retail Media’s evolution. Its potential extends far beyond optimisation. It will increasingly streamline the day-to-day operations of Retail Media Networks, automating planning, targeting, and reporting to free teams for more strategic work. This operational lift will allow networks to focus on what sets them apart: data, creativity, and customer experience. In parallel, AI will continue to enhance personalisation and insight, helping retailers better understand how shoppers engage and convert. The real opportunity lies in using AI not just to increase efficiency, but to elevate the quality and intelligence of the entire Retail Media ecosystem.”
Lucie: “AI is transforming the whole digital advertising ecosystem, including Retail and Commerce Media. Automating media planning, precise targeting, and complete reporting, while improving personalised ad delivery in real time, is now becoming a reality. However, the real disruptive shift is that a new commerce layer is forming where AI can trigger transactions directly. AI tools and APIs are moving toward integrated product recommendations and shoppable features in Large Language Models (LLMs) environments, as seen recently with Shopify or Instacart. AI agents will guide shopping decisions, not just product searches. Soon or later, AI Agents will become true virtual personal shoppers, buying products and services at the best deals and the fastest delivery time.
Retailers must build strong data and tech infrastructure so AI can find, read, and trust their catalogues, ensuring their products remain part of the shopper journey.”
Lars: “I believe the role of AI in Retail Media Networks (RMNs) will be a matter of strategic integration, not introduction. The RMNs that will thrive are those that fully leverage the existing, best-in-class AI already powering their core retail and commerce systems. This commerce-specific intelligence is essential for hyper-personalisation, smart bidding optimisation, and real-time ad relevance. Introducing a separate, external, and potentially costly AI solution risks creating a fragmented customer experience and a conflict with the core AI that already drives purchase propensity and site recommendations. The future of Commerce Media depends on utilising this native AI to deliver the trusted, closed-loop value proposition that uniquely connects the entire shopping journey.”
Ollie: “Measurement remains both the biggest challenge and the most important opportunity. The key will be collaboration, bringing retailers, brands, and agencies together to align on what effectiveness really means. That does not mean uniformity, but rather a shared language and clearer definitions across metrics like ROAS, incrementality, and long-term brand impact. We have focused heavily on performance-based metrics in recent years, but 2026 will require a more holistic understanding of success that connects short-term performance with long-term growth. True transparency and confidence will only come through partnership, shared accountability, and the ability to demonstrate credible value across every part of the funnel.”
Lucie: “To reach a truly transparent and standardised Retail Media measurement, we need the whole industry to align on shared rules and shared language. Common definitions for metrics like ROAS, incrementality, and attribution are the base. IAB Europe is already working on these standards, and this is helping to move the market in the same direction. But standards alone are not enough. Retailers, brands, agencies, and tech partners must work together and align on how data is tracked, calculated, and reported. When reporting frameworks follow the same structure, it becomes easier to compare results across networks. This builds trust and supports healthier growth for everyone.”
Lars: “I recognise that achieving a truly transparent and standardised Retail Media measurement ecosystem is a complex, long-term challenge due to inherent differences in retail purchase cycles and attribution. The most critical, immediate steps involve solving incrementality through AI-driven reporting and moving past broad industry debates to focus on actionable standards within specific vertical sub-categories like grocery and apparel. While full standardisation will not be solved in 2026, collaborative bodies like IAB Europe remain essential to building the trust and comparability required for Retail Media to unlock true brand media budgets.”
Ollie: “My focus for 2026 is integration. Europe has a unique opportunity to show how mature Retail Media can operate when creativity, technology, and partnership come together around shared objectives. I would like to see a more unified approach to planning that connects on site, off site, and in store into one cohesive ecosystem, with consistent measurement and stronger creative ambition. If retailers and brands can move from operating in silos to building shared roadmaps and common success metrics, Europe can lead the way in setting the global standard for connected, accountable, and creative retail media growth.
Lucie: “My wish list for Retail Media in Europe in 2026 starts with stronger data collaboration across retailers supported by tech. Today, each works in a silo, slowing scale and comparison. Better collaboration, along with simpler tech and data offers, would help everyone compete with the big walled gardens and allow off-site to grow faster, reaching more shoppers. I also hope to see wider adoption of real omnichannel strategies where on-site, off-site, store, and CTV work together to make the shopper journey clearer and more effective. Finally, deeper AI partnerships between retailers and tech providers will help prepare for changing shopper behaviours, as AI becomes a personal shopper influencing where and how people buy.”
Lars: “My top wish for Retail Media in Europe in 2026 is the accelerated maturity of advertiser demand. The European market is already on a strong growth trajectory, expanding nearly four times faster than the total digital ad market, but needs continued buy-side commitment to move beyond experimental spend. This is a self-fulfilling prophecy: as retailers adopt RTB-native infrastructure and simplify buying via programmatic channels, and as the industry delivers on standardised measurement and incrementality, the friction historically constraining investment will disappear. This strategic focus on efficiency and transparency is the key to securing the next wave of brand media budgets and sustaining Europe’s massive growth.”
IAB Europe’s Retail & Commerce Media Committee is at the forefront of the Retail Media industry. Members are driving Retail Media growth and shaping the landscape by:
All of the work of the Committee can be found in our Retail Media Hub here.
Find out more about our work and how you can get involved by contacting Marie-Clare Puffett - puffett [at] iabeurope.eu.
