In this blog post, our Senior Director, Industry Development & Marketing, Marie-Clare Puffett, who leads our Retail & Commerce Media work, shares why education is essential to helping the industry build the knowledge and confidence needed to navigate Retail Media effectively.
Retail Media is one of those topics where everyone has an opinion, but far fewer people have a genuinely solid grounding in how it actually works.
That gap matters more than it might seem. Retail Media is growing fast; it is structurally different from most other digital advertising areas, and the decisions being made about it right now, on measurement, on omnichannel strategy, on in-store, will shape how the industry operates for years. Getting it wrong is expensive. Getting it right requires more than a surface-level familiarity with the terminology.
And the terminology is part of the problem. Retail Media has accumulated a lot of it quickly. On-site, off-site, sponsored listings, in-store media, incrementality, closed-loop measurement. These terms get used confidently in meetings and strategies, sometimes by people who would struggle to explain precisely what they mean or how they interact. That is not a criticism; it is just what happens when a channel grows this fast. The knowledge infrastructure catches up later.
It is part of why, in my role leading IAB Europe's Retail & Commerce Media programme, I keep coming back to the question of education. Not training for its own sake, but the kind of structured, practitioner-led learning that actually changes how people think and make decisions.
We launched Retail Media Essentials because we were looking for a form that brought together agency and brand perspectives, covered measurement in real depth, and was built on input from practitioners who live in this space every day.
The feedback from the previous cohort told us something useful: the content on incrementality and measurement landed hard, because it cut through assumptions that a lot of professionals in this space carry without realising it. Incrementality, in particular, has a way of reframing how people think about retail media performance entirely. Once you understand what it is actually measuring and what it is not, a lot of the standard metrics look different. That is exactly what good training should do.
Retail Media is not going to get simpler. If anything, the complexity is increasing as the channel matures, offsite grows, and in-store finally starts to get the serious attention it deserves. The professionals who will navigate that well are the ones building their understanding now, before the pressure is fully on.
If that resonates, the next session runs in July. Take a look.
