Retail Media has outgrown the sponsored product listing. This year, members of IAB Europe's Retail & Commerce Media Committee used spotlight sessions to share research, case studies and perspectives on where the channel is heading next. Across those conversations, four themes kept coming up.
The physical store is emerging as the channel's next big frontier. Research shared with the committee showed that in-store audiences at top retailers rival, and often exceed, those of major broadcast TV networks. Yet stores still attract only a tiny fraction of ad spend relative to the time shoppers spend there.
The effectiveness case is strong. In-store formats deliver measurable sales uplift, add incremental reach to cross-media plans and build brands across the full funnel, from awareness through to purchase intent. Placement matters: impact is greatest close to the shelf and checkout, and experiential formats such as sampling perform best.
Audio is part of the same story. In-store audio networks are opening retail environments to non-endemic advertisers as well as the brands on the shelves, with Nordic case studies showing clear lifts in activation, awareness and sales when retail audio joins a wider audio plan. The message for marketers: stores are a mass-reach, brand-building medium, not just a last-click sales tool.
Retail media is also travelling well beyond retailers' own properties. Offsite retail media, which uses retailer data to reach shoppers across CTV, audio, gaming, digital out-of-home and the open web, is forecast to grow (according to eMarketer) from $11 billion globally in 2024 to $28 billion by 2028. With most consumers' digital time spent outside social media, offsite gives retailers a way to extend their reach and capture a bigger share of brand budgets.
As budgets grow, advertisers want evidence of what retail media truly adds, not just the sales it sits next to. Speakers were candid about how hard that still is. Brands sell through many retailers that report data inconsistently and late, and today's tools each leave gaps: A/B tests lean on media metrics that don't track sales, lift studies only report after a campaign ends, and marketing mix models look backwards by channel rather than by campaign.
The direction of travel is towards measurement that happens while campaigns are live. Combining media and store-level sales data, and running experiments within everyday campaigns, lets brands test audiences, tactics and creative in-flight and optimise towards real sales outcomes. One global confectionery brand shared how this has turned its campaigns into a continuous learning loop.
Longer attribution windows also change the picture. Evidence presented to the committee showed incremental returns from in-store activity continuing to build for months after a campaign, underlining that short-term measurement can undersell the channel.
AI assistants were the topic that generated the most discussion. Shopper journeys that once began with a keyword search are starting to begin with a conversation. Traffic from AI assistants tends to land directly on product pages with clear intent, and projections suggest it could overtake traditional organic search within a few years.
That shifts where value sits. When an AI agent builds a shortlist, being on that shortlist may matter more than winning the final click. Relevance also becomes richer: sponsored results must match a shopper's full request, not a single keyword.
Consumer research shared with the committee offers some reassurance and some guardrails. Shoppers want AI as a co-pilot rather than an autopilot, and most accept paid placements in recommendations as long as they are clearly labelled. They also want agents to surface smaller brands, not just the biggest names. Investment intentions are real, but much of the early money looks set to come from existing search and performance budgets rather than new ones.
The consensus: retail media is not disappearing in an agentic world, it is being redefined. Transparency, relevance and shopper control will be essential to keeping trust.
Whatever the surface, whether a store screen, a speaker in the aisle or an AI assistant, the same fundamentals came up again and again. Product catalogues need to be complete and accurate, with reliable stock and pricing. Product content needs richer, intent-based metadata that AI systems can read. And first-party and store-level sales data need to be connected so they can power targeting and measurement.
Retailers also want to put their data to work without giving up control of it. Product-level data can power targeting and closed-loop measurement, but governance and permissions must stay with the retailer. AI is starting to help here too, from automatically building product sets out of a retailer's catalogue to predicting which shoppers are in-market.
None of this sits with one team. Speakers repeatedly pointed to silos between sales, marketing, e-commerce, data and product teams as the biggest brake on progress. The organisations moving fastest are those building a shared strategy and shared data across these functions, and experimenting early rather than waiting for the market to settle.
Retail Media is expanding into new spaces and new technologies at the same time as the demand for proof grows. The committee will keep exploring these themes in the sessions ahead.
IAB Europe’s Retail Media Committee is at the forefront of the retail media industry. Members are driving retail media growth and shaping the landscape by:
Find out more about getting involved by contacting Marie-Clare Puffett - puffett [@] iabeurope.eu
