The retail media industry has made significant progress on in-store measurement over the past year, but the conversation remains anchored to outdated assumptions.
Test-and-control store measurement is starting to emerge as the preferred approach for in-store retail media networks (RMNs). Albertsons Media Collective announced matched market incrementality measurement in January 2026, comparing sales performance in test stores exposed to ads against rigorously selected control stores. This shows progress for the retail media industry, and retailers who have built this foundation have established critical infrastructure.
It's important to understand what this development actually represents. Test-and-control store measurement has been a staple of brick-and-mortar retail for years. Retailers have long used this methodology to measure new store formats, pricing strategies, merchandising approaches and promotional tactics.
What Boise, Idaho-based Albertsons and other retail media networks are doing is applying this proven methodology to retail media measurement specifically. That's an evolution that drives real value for brands. Brands appreciate having retail media measured with the same rigor and proven frameworks as other retail initiatives. It provides confidence and comparability.
However, while this adaptation represents progress, it's applying an existing playbook and leaves opportunity on the table. The real measurement innovation opportunity for in-store retail media lies in challenging a fundamental assumption about the channel itself.
The outdated addressability assumption
A prevailing assumption persists across the industry: in-store retail media is inherently not addressable, especially compared to tactics on-site, digital banners or open web ads.
That assumption no longer reflects reality.
This perspective makes sense when viewing in-store media through the lens of traditional digital out-of-home (DOOH) or conventional out-of-home (OOH) advertising. Those channels operated with advertisers having no relationship with the audience and limited context about who was actually exposed to their messaging.
Retail media operates under fundamentally different conditions. It exists in an environment the retailer owns, controls and can measure. A significant portion of shoppers walking through those stores self-identify as loyalty members with every transaction.
Grocery loyalty program membership exceeds 70% of U.S. consumers. In convenience retail, while loyalty penetration varies significantly by chain, leading operators report loyalty participation rates at or above 50% of transactions. Beyond formal loyalty programs, customers are identifiable as repeat customers through credit card data, mobile app usage and other behavioral signals.
Retailers possess customer context and first-party data that traditional DOOH cannot access at the same level. The industry is simply not fully leveraging it yet for in-store media measurement.
Technologies enabling addressable in-store media
Much of the infrastructure needed for addressable in-store media already exists, and innovation in the space is accelerating quickly. The challenge is systematically connecting it to retail media measurement frameworks.
Facial detection and recognition technology represents a more significant leap, particularly around customer experience and privacy considerations. But the technology exists today, either through purpose-built cameras or leveraging existing in-store camera infrastructure with AI-powered processing and detection.
The initial reaction to considering this technology for retail measurement is almost always centered around privacy concerns, but counterintuitively, this ignores the customer relationship.
TSA PreCheck provides a useful analog. More than 22 million people are enrolled in TSA PreCheck, voluntarily submitting to biometric screening and identity verification (in addition to paying a fee) because the value exchange is clear: faster, more convenient travel. When it launched in 2011, there were legitimate privacy questions. Now it's an expected part of the travel experience for frequent flyers. This is people trusting the federal government with their data, but it’s also worth noting that CLEAR, a publicly traded, for-profit company based in New York, reported over 36 million members who are sharing similar data with the company as of third-quarter 2025.
The same pattern will emerge in retail when the benefit is tangible enough. If facial recognition at store entry or the cash register meant personalized offers, faster checkout or genuinely better product recommendations, a meaningful portion of customers would opt in. Imagine a world where you could opt-in to skip having to enter your phone number or scan your card at checkout. The key is making the value exchange explicit and beneficial.
Beacons and geofencing
These technologies are already deployed in many retail environments, though not typically connected to retail media measurement systems.
Some argue these aren't as precise as digital addressability, that they can't deliver person-level targeting the way mobile or web can. That argument doesn't hold up under scrutiny.
The level of precision needed for effective retail media measurement may be different than what we assume when we anchor to digital standards. If geofencing can identify that a specific device (and by extension, a specific customer) was in a particular store section when an in-store display was running, that's a meaningful signal for attribution. Combined with transaction data, that becomes a powerful data point for measurement.
The broader technology landscape
These represent just two examples. The reality is we're at the early stages of what's possible—computer vision systems that track customer flow patterns and dwell times without requiring individual identification, mobile app-based location tracking that maps customer journeys through stores, smart cart technology that knows exactly which products a customer considered and which aisles they traveled and advanced sensor networks that connect physical proximity to specific displays with purchase behavior.
As the financial opportunity in in-store retail media grows, the incentive to innovate on measurement technology intensifies. Continued investment and development in this space is inevitable. The technology pipeline is deep, and many of these solutions will become more sophisticated and cost-effective as scale increases.
Loyalty data as measurement foundation
The most underutilized asset for in-store retail media measurement is loyalty data itself. When a loyalty member makes a purchase after being exposed to in-store media, the retailer has a closed-loop view of exposure and conversion.
The challenge is determining exposure. Digital screens, static displays and end caps can't measure impressions on their own. This is where complementary technologies become valuable supplements to loyalty transaction data.
Retailers who can stitch these signals together, linking a loyalty member's exposure to in-store media with their purchase behavior, can build attribution models that rival digital channels in precision.
Where standards fall short
The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and IAB Europe released finalized in-store retail media measurement standards in December 2024 after months of industry collaboration. These standards endeavored to establish common definitions for store zones, impression metrics and sales measurement approaches.
That's a necessary start. But the standards focus almost exclusively on foundational definitions and basic measurement windows (30 days pre-exposure, campaign duration, 30 days post-exposure, etc.) They don't push the industry toward true addressability.
The standards address critical definitional challenges. They define store zones (exterior, entrance, checkout, in aisles, other). They establish impression metrics like "opportunity to see" and "likelihood to see." They recommend sales measurement approaches like incremental lift and test-versus-control methodologies.
However, they don't adequately address how to leverage loyalty data for individual-level attribution. They don't provide guidance on connecting in-store exposure to customer journeys across channels. They don't tackle how retailers should think about opt-in technologies that make in-store media addressable.
The standards essentially treat in-store media as an enhanced version of DOOH. They standardize what we’ve already been doing for years, not what we should be building toward.
In December 2025, the IAB released "A Viable Framework for Maturing In-Store Media Measurement," acknowledging that "adoption has been slow due to operational complexity, inconsistent standards and a lack of comparability across networks." This suggests even the IAB recognizes the initial standards don't go far enough.
The business case for rethinking measurement
For retailers, better measurement of in-store media directly impacts their ability to capture more share of retail media spend or unlock entirely new incremental dollars.
In-store media is expected to reach $580 billion in the U.S. in 2026 according to eMarketer's December 2025 forecast, representing 33.1% growth from 2025. But that's still less than 1% of the projected $71.67 billion total U.S. omnichannel retail media spend for 2026. On-site and off-site retail media continue to dominate spend allocation.
This gap doesn't exist because in-store media doesn't work. According to recent industry analysis, even though over 95% of food and beverage spending happens in-store, over 99% of retail media advertising remains online. The disconnect is measurement, not effectiveness.
Brands allocate more dollars to channels where they can measure performance with confidence. A retailer that can demonstrate incremental lift from in-store placements with the same confidence level as digital doesn't just compete for existing budgets. They expand what's possible for the entire channel and reset consumer-packaged goods (CPG) expectations for what in-store media can deliver.
The financial stakes are substantial. By the end of 2026, in-store media networks should be competing directly for national media budgets in ways they haven't before. Major retailers like Cincinnati-based Kroger and Albertsons are planning aggressive screen rollouts. The infrastructure is being built. The question is whether the measurement capabilities will keep pace.
The path forward
The retail media networks willing to push past foundational test-and-control methodologies and genuinely innovate on addressability will pull ahead significantly over the next few years.
This isn't about having the most screens or the most store locations. It's about proving measurable impact in an environment everyone assumed required compromises on measurement quality.
The retailers and tech partners willing to navigate the privacy and customer experience considerations thoughtfully while pushing measurement capabilities forward will define what in-store retail media becomes. That means investing in data infrastructure, being transparent with customers about data usage and being willing to risk piloting opt-in programs that demonstrate clear value exchange.
We're at an inflection point. The question is—which networks will lean into the challenge?
Matt Riezman is partner at Des Moines, Iowa-based consulting firm NexChapter. Reach him at matt@nexchapter.com.
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