The retail media industry has decided that bigger networks, budgets and AI investments will win the market. It’s the same story every maturing ad channel tells itself once the smaller players start showing up, and it’s echoed in a Wall Street Journal piece comparing retail media’s current stage to an awkward teenager still figuring out who gets to sit where at lunch.
The comparison holds in one respect. Retail media is still growing, but the assumption underneath it (i.e., that scale and technology spend are what separate the winners from everyone else) doesn’t hold up against what’s actually happening inside these networks right now.
IAB projects commerce media ad spend to grow 12.1% in 2026, outpacing the broader ad market’s 9.5% growth, and the biggest retail media networks are funneling a lot of that new capital into AI-driven targeting, predictive models and automated optimization. Meanwhile, brands and agencies keep running into the same wall. They can’t tell, with any consistency, whether the media they bought actually led to a sale.
The Problem AI Can’t Solve For
Despite that shift in strategy, the gap holding brands back is how success is measured, not technology, and no amount of AI spend closes it.
Brands, retailers and agencies each measure success against a different scorecard, and that mismatch is the real alignment gap. A brand might judge a campaign on units sold, while a retailer reports impressions or clicks, and an agency compares two RMNs by pulling iROAS from one and a raw impression count from the other. Each data point holds up on its own, but none of them speak the same language, meaning results from one partner rarely reconcile with results from another.
Advanced targeting doesn’t solve that mismatch. A brand can run the most sophisticated AI-driven targeting on the market and still walk away from a campaign unable to answer the one question that actually matters: whether the media led to a sale. For instance, a retailer might report a 20% lift in impression-based reach while a brand’s own sales data shows no corresponding increase in units sold.
This is the gap our latest research, in partnership with Catalyst Media Consulting, intended to close. What we found led to Shopper Purchase Rate (SPR), a framework built to give the industry one purchase-based standard for measuring retail media performance, regardless of a network’s scale.
The Advantage of Moving First
Standardized, purchase-based measurement rewards speed over scale. SPR requires a network to show, clearly and consistently, that a purchase followed exposure to its media. Meeting that requirement depends on how quickly a network can adopt the framework into its current measurement and reporting systems, not on the size of its ad server or the sophistication of its predictive models.
How quickly a network adopts a purchase-based standard depends on how much of its existing measurement and reporting infrastructure needs adjusting. In-Store Marketplace (ISM) integrated SPR into its measurement approach, equipping RMNs with the operational frameworks needed to seamlessly implement this structure within their own internal workflows. For networks with extensive infrastructure and deep-rooted reporting systems, the new standards will need to be adopted through a structured, phased roadmap over time, rather than an immediate shift.
Adoption speed like that plays a real role in which networks lead, as purchase-based measurement becomes the standard that every network is expected to meet.
Where Retail Media Goes From Here
The next phase of retail media will separate networks by proof rather than scale. A network that can show a brand exactly how its media moved units builds a case that a bigger network running on impressions and clicks can’t match, regardless of budget.
Shared, purchase-based standards are already gaining ground. SPR gave the industry one such standard to test, and the next phase of that research is already underway with retailers and CPGs. Each round makes the case that a common measurement language for in-store retail media is achievable.
The industry spent years assuming the biggest networks would set the terms of measurement. Right now, that definition is being written by whichever networks can prove a purchase actually happened, and scale has nothing to do with who gets to write it.
Paul Brenner is Senior Vice President of Retail Media and Partnerships at ISM. With 25+ years in media and advertising technology leadership, he has held several C-suite roles, including division President at Emmis Operating Company (NASDAQ: EMMS). As President of NextRadio/TagStation, he drove global innovation through FM chip activations in smartphones for audience measurement and data attribution across broadcast radio. In 2019, Paul joined Vibenomics as Chief Strategy Officer to launch its first-to-market Audio In-Store advertising solution, later becoming President of Audio OOH. Following Vibenomics’ integration with Mood Media, he now leads ISM’s In-Store Retail Media segment.
