As consumer behaviour shifts and media consumption fragments, the lines between Connected TV (CTV) and Retail Media are rapidly blurring. This blog explores how these two powerful ecosystems are converging to create more seamless, data-driven advertising experiences. From enhanced audience targeting to measurable outcomes across the path to purchase, we unpack the strategic synergies that are reshaping brand engagement.
A big thank you to the following contributors for sharing their thoughts:
Anne Höldke, Retail Media & Compliance Manager, Ad Alliance
Lucie Laurendon, Product Marketing Director, Equativ
Lucie: “Retail Media data, like users’ purchases and shopping intent, helps improve CTV ads by targeting the right audience with relevant messages. After the campaign, Retail Media data can help measure the impact of CTV campaigns by linking ad views with actual purchases, online or in-store, so advertisers know what works best.”
Anne: “Retail Media data transforms CTV advertising through authenticated consumer intent signals, enabling precision marketing in commerce. Unlike demographic targeting, retail data provides verified purchase behaviour for personalised CTV creative optimisation. For CTV publishers, this creates opportunities to offer superior targeting capabilities. Publishers partner with retailers through Data Clean Room collaborations, overlapping consented users from both ends, and consequently developing high-performance audience segments that deliver better campaign results. When CTV inventory reaches authenticated purchasers of specific categories, advertisers achieve higher conversion rates and ROAS, making CTV campaigns more effective for commerce-driven objectives than traditional brand awareness approaches.”
Lucie: “With fragmented but highly engaged audiences, CTV makes it possible to leverage transactional or behavioral data from retail to activate targeted, contextualised, and measurable campaigns on a large scale. By combining first-party data from retailers with the addressability capabilities of CTV platforms, it becomes possible, for example, to broadcast a relevant ad to a family who has already made a similar or complementary purchase. This means ads are more personal and shown at the best time, on screens and shows where people pay more attention, using premium ad formats.
For agencies and advertisers, CTV also offers new premium spaces to advertise and direct ways to measure how well the campaigns work. This helps them extend their Retail Media efforts to TV screens, which were mostly used for brand awareness before, giving them more power to run full-funnel campaigns.”
Anne: “Connecting Retail Media data and CTV enables valuable amplification for advertisers. Publishers with CTV, in-page, and display inventory can orchestrate complete customer journeys. For example, a brand can target authenticated cart abandoners through CTV campaigns, then retarget with display ads on mobile devices within the same household featuring specific product discounts. The publisher can also scale the audience by creating lookalike segments and extending reach with adjacent target groups from its DMP. This cross-device retargeting approach maximises campaign reach while maintaining message consistency. Publishers can coordinate messaging across all touchpoints - from CTV awareness to mobile display conversion - creating comprehensive campaign ecosystems that demonstrate measurable business impact through integrated attribution.”
Lucie: “A major challenge is that CTV and Retail Media have been managed in silos until now. CTV is often led by brand teams focused on reach and awareness, while Retail Media is driven by commerce or performance teams optimising for conversions and ROAS. These teams typically operate with separate KPIs, timelines, and platforms, making alignment difficult. Measurement remains a key pain point. Connecting CTV ad exposure to actual retail sales, online or in-store, is often complicated.
Anne: “While technical measurement challenges exist, publishers should guide advertisers toward objective-specific KPIs rather than universal measurement approaches. Different campaign objectives require different success metrics - ROAS for conversion campaigns, page visits for consideration, and brand lift for awareness. Publishers can offer testing frameworks comparing traditional targeting against retail data activation through parallel campaign flights. Data Clean Room capabilities enable attribution analysis by overlaying campaign exposure with purchase behaviour during campaign periods. Additionally, integrated brand lift studies measure awareness, purchase intent, and consideration changes. This positions publishers as strategic consultants helping advertisers prove incremental value through controlled testing methodologies rather than struggling with technical measurement gaps.”
Lucie: “The convergence between CTV and Retail Media opens up new and powerful opportunities for retailers looking to expand their Retail Media strategy beyond performance channels and into full-funnel marketing. By using shopper data, retailers can offer brands more relevant and personalised campaigns, while generating new revenue streams. CTV also increases viewer attention compared to traditional digital formats, thanks to a more immersive experience and innovative ad formats. Unlike traditional TV, CTV also supports full-funnel strategies, helping retailers engage consumers from awareness to conversion, with measurable results. Another key benefit is the ability to link ads to local store data, allowing for geolocalised promotions based on stock or offers in nearby locations. Finally, CTV fits naturally into an omnichannel retail media strategy, working alongside on-site, off-site, and in-store channels to deliver a consistent and more impactful shopper experience.”
Anne: “Retailers gain significant advantages through publisher partnerships beyond traditional media buying. Privacy-safe collaboration with publishers enables comprehensive customer journey mapping across off-site inventory, providing attribution insights and deeper customer understanding that retailers cannot achieve independently.
Publishers offer essential audience scaling capabilities - creating lookalike audiences and extending reach through their DMP data. For retailers, look-alike modeling through publisher partnerships represents the only viable path for new customer acquisition at scale. Retailers can leverage publisher data to identify potential customers beyond their existing database, then coordinate messaging across CTV, display, and in-store touchpoints. This offsite inventory access, combined with comprehensive measurement capabilities, enables retailers to optimise the complete customer journey while generating incremental revenue.”
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.
