In this blog our Senior Director, Industry Development & Marketing, discusses how three years of IAB Europe data shows a space that has earned its place on the plan. She shares how the next phase of growth will be decided less by whether Retail Media works, and more by whether the industry can prove it, consistently, across every network and every new touchpoint.
When I joined IAB Europe, programmatic was one of the fast-growing areas of digital advertising. It was exciting, slightly chaotic and a space that everyone was trying to make sense of. Retail Media today feels very similar. The energy is real, the investment is real, but so are the growing pains.
Our third annual Attitudes to Retail Media study, based on 150 advertisers, agencies and Retail Media Networks (RMNs) across Europe and, for the first time, MENA, gives us the clearest picture yet of where the market stands. The headline is simple: Retail Media has moved beyond experimentation. The harder question is what the industry now needs to build so that commitment turns into sustainable, long-term growth.
The clearest trend in our data is the shift to long-term relationships. 71% of European buyers have now partnered with retailers for more than a year, up from 64% in 2025 and 51% in 2024. That 21-point rise is statistically significant, and it has moved in the same direction in every wave.
The sell-side mirrors it: 69% of retailers and networks have had an offer in place for over a year, and 65% run a dedicated Retail Media sales team. Nearly three-quarters of buyers increased their investment in Retail Media last year, and when comparing Retail Media with other advertising channels, twice as many buyers reported being more satisfied as those who reported being less satisfied.
Brands are no longer running tests; they are building relationships that outlast a planning cycle. Retail Media has become an area organisations plan around, not one they dip into.
But adoption is not the same as industrialisation. Buyers rate their own Retail Media maturity at 3.2 out of 5 on average, and only 12% describe their approach as fully sophisticated, with strategy, data, tools and measurement integrated. Most of the market sits in the middle: committed and active across several retailers, but not yet running Retail Media with the consistency and rigour of a fully established channel.
What stands out in this year's data is that nobody is questioning whether Retail Media works. They are questioning whether they can prove it. Lack of measurement and reporting is now the top barrier to investment, named by 61% of European buyers. Close behind sit lack of available data, lack of standardisation and the fragmentation of retail media networks. Lack of data alone rose a significant 27 points in a year.
Fragmentation is real: 63% of buyers work with four or more networks, each of which may define and report results differently. As one advertiser put it, the industry still has "the classic issue of counting apples and pears".
The questions buyers ask have also changed. Demand for ROAS among European buyers fell from 89% to 49% in a single year, the sharpest movement in the study. Unified online and offline reporting (66%), new-to-brand (63%) and incrementality (57%) now lead. Buyers want to know whether Retail Media grew the business, not just how efficiently a campaign ran.
That matters because much of the money is coming from brand budgets. Half of buyers who re-allocate spend into Retail Media take it from brand advertising. If Retail Media is funded like brand, it must be evidenced like brand, with proof of incremental, longer-term effect rather than last-click sales.
Supply has not yet caught up. 58% of buyers want multi-touch attribution, against 31% of sellers offering it. And buyers rank reporting and transparency (86%) and measurement options (70%) as their top criteria for choosing a network, ahead of performance and price.
Encouragingly, sellers have noticed: enhancing their measurement offer is their top priority for the year ahead (63%), and 45% plan to adopt industry measurement standards.
No single network can solve fragmentation on its own. That is precisely the kind of problem an industry body exists to tackle, and where we at IAB Europe are focusing our efforts.
Our Commerce Media Measurement Standards give buyers and sellers a shared basis for the metrics that matter most, including definitions for incrementality, new-to-brand and ROAS. When buyers who name standardisation as a barrier were asked where it is needed most, attribution (79%) and media measurement (73%) came out far ahead of everything else. The standards speak directly to that ask.
Standards only create confidence if people can see they are being met. Our Retail Media Certification Programme lets networks demonstrate this independently, helping them stand out on the criteria buyers rank highest, and giving buyers a simple question to put to every partner.
Uptake, not the existence of standards, is now the gap; as one retailer told us, they have yet to fully "cut through". With more support from the buy-side to see apples compared to apples, this will gradually change. Some top buyer asks, such as unified online and offline reporting, sit beyond today's standards, and AI-driven discovery is not yet covered. Our Retail & Commerce Media Committee's 2027 programme will tackle incrementality and measurement standards, data readiness for AI, and physical stores in an agentic world.
The ask is straightforward. We encourage every network to adopt the standards and seek certification, and every buyer to ask for it. The more the market uses a shared framework, the more valuable it becomes for everyone.
The space is not standing still while measurement catches up. Three areas stand out as the next wave of opportunity, and each raises the stakes for getting the foundations right.
In-store media. Over half of sellers (51%) now offer on-site, off-site and digital in-store together, yet one in five buyers invests in no digital in-store format. The opportunity is to connect the store to the same data and measurement as online activity, delivering the unified online and offline reporting buyers want.
Travel Media. The ingredients that made Retail Media compelling, first-party data, high-intent audiences and proximity to the transaction, apply well beyond grocery. As commerce media expands into travel, the lesson is to build common measurement from the start rather than repeat retail's fragmentation.
AI-driven commerce. Over two-thirds of sellers (68%) plan to develop AI-powered campaign management in the next 12 months, and half plan to build for product visibility inside AI assistants. Buyers rank agentic discovery level with campaign optimisation as their biggest expected driver of investment.
This is an industry bet rather than measured shopper behaviour. But if discovery moves into an assistant's answer, there is currently no agreed way to see, attribute or verify it. Whoever sets those measurement standards early will shape where the money goes.
Retail Media has earned its place. The commitment is there in the partnerships, the dedicated teams and the rising budgets. What will determine the next phase of growth is whether the industry can give buyers the confidence to keep investing, and that confidence rests on consistent, transparent, comparable measurement. We have seen this play out before, and it was the early adopters of standardisation that had most to gain, once the market turned a “nice to have” into a “must have”.
The same is true of what comes next. In-store, Travel Media and AI-driven commerce each have real potential, but they will scale faster, and more fairly, if they are built on shared foundations rather than on dozens of competing definitions.
None of this can be solved by one retailer, one agency or one technology provider. It needs buyers and sellers working together, adopting common standards, demanding certification and shaping the frameworks for the channels still taking form. IAB Europe will keep convening that conversation. I would encourage everyone with a stake in commerce media to be part of it.
