In-store retail media has the “reach, quality, rent, safety, and cultural relevance that marketers traditionally want,” said Andrew Lipsman, founder and chief analyst, media, ads, and commerce at Colosseum Strategy, during IAB’s Connected Commerce Summit.

• However, in-store advertising lags behind other channels, representing just 0.1% of total ad spend, while time spent in store represents 5% of time spent with media, he said.

Marketers may be holding back because in-store retail media lacks the framework required for scale.

“Do I want to get in front of the shopper in the store? Yes," said Benoit Vatere, chief media officer at Liquid Death. "Is there an infrastructure to support that properly yet? No."

Measurement is often cited as a major barrier to in-store retail media, and the overlap between retail and media only pushes it further down the priority list for brands.

• “We start calling it media, and it triggers a bunch of really uncomfortable conversations,” said Jordan Witmer, managing director retail media at Salt Media. “Do I own it? Do you own it? Who does the creative? What agency is responsible? Who gets a billet? And somewhere maybe fifth or sixth down that list—does it work?”
• That’s why it’s important for brands to use a top-down approach to media strategy.
• “It has to be driven by the CEO or senior officer,” said Vatere. “We need to look at it as an overall plan, and we need to measure it well.”

Without the ability to measure performance as precisely as digital, advertisers are hesitant to invest more of their dollars, especially upper-funnel ones, in-store.

"We know that there are millions of shoppers that are walking into stores every single day, so it's obviously an upper funnel opportunity, but we can't measure it, so we don't do it," said Chelsey Alexander, founder and CEO of Open Gate Consulting.

But the situation looks different overseas, according to Matt Claisse, media director at SMG.

• “In-store [has become] the cornerstone of retail media [in Europe],” he said. “The relationship and partnership that brands or advertisers have has become… a bit more of a partnership approach.”
• European brands have “accepted this is the space where we can have the most amount of impact with customers … even if it’s not absolutely perfect, but it’s good enough,” said Claisse.

The growth of in-store retail media in the US may depend on redefining success.

“We’ve got to get comfortable with not letting perfection be the enemy of good enough,” said Alexander. “A lot of upper funnel metrics are already proxies anyway… So are there ways that we can get a little bit comfortable using some proxies and some estimates to start to move forward?”

The bottom line: For many brands, the challenge is no longer whether in-store can deliver value, but how to build the infrastructure and measurement approaches to make the channel easier to plan and scale.

• “In-store activation is a huge business driver,” said Witmer. “But it’s certainly been deprioritized and kind of squashed in the past five years.”

Now, that dynamic is shifting, as urgency around in-store is growing and the channel regains importance, said Alexander.

"Consumers are so overwhelmed with the amount of messages that they're getting out of the store," she said. "If I'm a brand, I'm already having trouble getting large size audiences, and they're already in store, and then they're in the mood to buy. What a great opportunity to influence what they buy."

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