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Retail media is quickly outpacing other areas of digital advertising and is projected to grow 29% by 2025. Despite this trajectory, retail media is still relatively new compared to traditional digital media and operates like a startup in terms of tech capabilities. Sustained growth will require retail media standardization — creating consistent ways to measure and compare ad performance across retail media networks (RMNs). This standardization will be key for RMNs wanting to understand what’s driving the most value and sales for their business.
In an Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) study, 62% of ad buyers pointed to standardization as a top growth challenge. The current ecosystem’s inconsistent standards have prevented effective investment in measurement and limited ad buyer participation. Standardization will be necessary moving forward for effective adoption and trust in these new channels.
This article explores the challenges marketers face without retail media standardization and the collaborative efforts needed to establish consistent measurement standards across the industry.
How much standardization currently exists?
Retail media standardization is limited industry-wide, with each RMN using its own metrics and definitions; what one network calls a “conversion” might be defined differently by another. Some retail companies also sell ad space within siloed, walled-garden shopping environments, which makes it difficult for advertisers to compare performance across platforms. As a result, the current landscape lends itself to inconsistency, campaign measurement complications, and an unclear view of return on investment (ROI) across RMNs.
This fragmentation stems from how retailers have historically developed and managed customer data platforms and e-commerce websites independently, causing disparities in the types and quality of customer data available and the technologies used to manage it. Each retailer uses a unique technology stack and customer experience strategies, which means data is collected, utilized, and integrated into advertising platforms differently.
Why is standardization important?
A 2023 State of Retail Media Survey highlighted the industry’s lack of standardization as a significant obstacle to growth. The Association of National Advertisers also found that advertisers can’t fully take advantage of their retail media investments because of inconsistent measurement practices. Standardized retail media measurement practices are critical for growth. By setting consistent measurement standards across different platforms, it becomes easier for various players to:
- Assess how ads are performing
- See which strategies work across RMNs
- Optimize ad spending
- Make informed decisions
- Extract more value from advertising budgets
Ultimately, standardized metrics are a must for improving transparency, strategic effectiveness, and ROI.
Who is promoting standardization?
We’re seeing a collective push for retail media standardization by several industry stakeholders wanting a more cohesive and effective advertising ecosystem. One of the most recent efforts came from the IAB and the Media Rating Council (MRC). These organizations collaborated with brands, agencies, and RMNs to develop new guidelines for standardized measurement practices and have given the ecosystem a proposed common language for retail media measurement.
These guidelines were released in January 2024 to provide a consistent framework for the following across retail media platforms:
- Audience measurement
- Reporting
- Incrementality
- Transparency
- Viewability
- Ad delivery
- In-store advertising
Microsoft Retail Media, an early adopter of the framework, has experienced greater data transparency, accuracy, privacy, and security, which has benefited advertisers and retailers and advanced Microsoft’s position as a retail media industry leader. Widespread adoption of these guidelines has the potential to drive innovation, attract more advertisers, strengthen collaboration, grow the industry, and improve the consumer experience.
The benefits of industry standardization
A standardized retail media framework for performance measurement can benefit advertisers, retailers, media agencies, and other stakeholders in the ecosystem. Here are some ways each entity stands to benefit.
Benefits for retailers
Standardization makes it easier for retailers to demonstrate their credibility and the value of their retail media program. With uniform measurement across channels and campaigns, they can provide clear, comparable data that reflects their impact, builds trust, and encourages advertiser investment. Better campaign management efficiency also reduces the operational burden, so retailers can focus on improving customer experiences and driving sales.
Experian’s Activity Feed helps you measure performance — and understand how ads impact shopping behavior — by providing you with ad exposures in one environment (web or connected TV) that you can connect to an action in another (in-store purchase). Learn more about Activity Feed and see it in action here.
Benefits for media agencies and marketers
With standardized metrics, advertisers and media agencies have an easy, reliable way to compare metrics and assess the effectiveness of various campaigns across RMNs. This “apples to apples” comparison helps them determine which channels are truly driving better ROI so they can effectively optimize spending.
Standardization also improves collaboration with retailers and leads to more effective campaigns. Consistent guidelines can help teams create, carry out, and optimize retail media strategies and easily compare platform effectiveness.
Benefits for industry stakeholders
Industry stakeholders like technology providers and regulatory bodies can greatly benefit from standardized retail media measurement practices. Consistent measurement provides a common framework that improves transparency and trust among parties. With reliable and comparable metrics, standardization helps everyone speak the same language when it comes to performance evaluation and decision-making. This uniformity facilitates smoother interactions and partnerships between the buy and sell sides, so it’s easier to negotiate and collaborate.
Strategies for implementing retail media standardization
Standardizing measurement will require industry-wide coordination around several strategies, as outlined in best practices frameworks from standardization proponents like IAB/MRC and the Albertson’s Media Collective.
Unify reporting and performance measurement
To address the lack of standardization in performance metrics, RMNs must adopt uniform definitions and calculation methodologies for key metrics. Unified reporting in retail media requires successful stakeholder collaboration to:
- Agree on critical KPIs and reporting metrics like impressions and conversion rates
- Adopt standardized data formats and reporting tools
- Educate stakeholders
- Ensure data quality and compliance
- Continuously improve based on industry feedback
The IAB/MRC framework provides a basis for standardizing metrics for media delivery and engagement, as well as sales and conversions. This consistency helps advertisers compare performance across platforms effectively, enhancing transparency and decision-making.
Standardize product specifications
It’s important for advertisers to have consistent product specifications, as it makes it easier to create and deploy ads across multiple RMNs. To achieve this, RMNs should align ad formats, file sizes, animations, and video specifications with IAB guidelines. Following these standards will help RMNs eliminate compatibility issues, simplify adoption, and save time and resources. It’s also vital for RMNs to maintain flexibility for unique ad formats in order to encourage innovation while still benefiting from standardized specifications.
Introduce third-party verification and disclose capabilities
Introducing third-party verification for ad placement, fraud detection, brand safety, and competitive separation can improve an RMN’s credibility and transparency. By disclosing the third-party providers used and the types of verification offered, RMNs build trust with advertisers and give them the confidence they need to invest.
Additionally, RMNs should disclose their staffing, processes, technology, inventory management, targeting, creative management, and self-service offerings. Transparency in these areas helps advertisers make informed decisions, optimize ad buys, and increase efficiency. Using existing IAB verification and capability disclosure guidelines ensures reliability and a more trustworthy, efficient advertising environment.
Future retail media standardization trends
The future of retail media is poised for significant growth, especially as standardization guidelines are widely adopted and implemented. Here are some trends we expect to see as retail media ad spending grows.
Widespread RMN adoption and spending
Standardization could spur greater RMN spending and drive broad adoption by advertisers who hesitated before due to concerns about metrics and performance comparability.
New partnerships and collaborations
Standardization may lead to new partnerships that weren’t possible before:
- Brands and retailers might team up to blend advertising and sales data for better-targeted campaigns.
- AdTech companies could also partner with multiple retailers to offer unified advertising solutions.
- Retail media networks and analytics firms could collaborate to provide deep insights into consumer behavior and campaign performance.
- Partnerships among retailers, including smaller ones seeking retail media measurement uniformity, may drive further standardization and create new advertising opportunities across product categories with audience overlap.
Ad format innovation
Agreeing on common standards simplifies how ads are measured and understood. Standardization may drive down costs and free up space for more imaginative, engaging ads in the future. For instance, the IAB/MRC’s common language is helping to promote consistency and clarity and fuel innovation across the board.
Incrementality focus
As standardization becomes more widespread, there may be a growing trend toward incrementality measurement, which measures the additional impact of advertising campaigns compared to what would have happened without them. Standardized metrics can help advertisers accurately gauge and optimize campaign effectiveness and maximize their marketing investments.
Growth of cross-platform ad targeting
Standardization may drive the growth of cross-platform ad targeting. With consistent metrics and measurement standards, advertisers will be able to track and compare their ad performance across platforms more accurately. This unified approach will improve ad targeting precision and ensure a consistent impact across RMNs.
Commerce media
Commerce media is changing retail advertising with its focus on verified data and real-time transaction insights, making campaigns more efficient. This shift could push for more uniform measurement standards across platforms and level the playing field. As commerce media gains traction, its emphasis on targeted advertising and ROI measurement might pave the way for universal metrics and clearer guidelines across retail networks.
Where does this leave modern advertisers?
Retail media is still at a crossroads. If standardization doesn’t occur soon, its growth may slow. For now, advertisers are resorting to custom strategies or relying on whichever network they feel is most effective for their products. They are likely to continue investing significantly in retail media, maintaining or increasing spending in the next year.
Although RMNs continue to be challenging without formally recognized standardization guidelines, the proposed IAB/MRC guidelines provide an effective starting point.
Join forces with a strategic RMN partner
RMN success requires overcoming complicated technical hurdles that may exceed non-media business capacities. Managing data complexities, resolving identities, utilizing audience insights, and ensuring precise measurement requires specialized expertise and technologies.
We recently announced a solution tailored for RMNs. This offering enhances RMNs’ strength in first-party shopper data by using Experian’s #1 ranked identity and audience services. Our solution helps RMNs unlock expanded customer insights, enriched audiences for activation, identity resolution for cross-channel audience targeting, and real-time measurement and attribution. This comprehensive solution is designed to help RMNs capture more advertising revenue.
If your organization could benefit from a partner with the requisite technological tools and insights into the retail media landscape, contact us to discover how we can help you achieve RMN success.
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It’s the holiday season! For some, this is the time of year for family, friends and reflection. For the other 97 percent* of us, it’s time to shop! America’s obsession with Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the rest of the holiday shopping season has never been stronger. Or weaker? Or something? All I know is that you should be skeptical of anything you see regarding the Thanksgiving weekend performance. And now, I will tell you about the Thanksgiving weekend performance We’re not discussing revenue in this post. Instead, we’ll dive into the weekend’s email subject lines – more specifically, how “percent off” deals affected email open rates. As everyone knows, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the days for deals. Juicy “percent off” offers motivate customers to buy, buy, buy. But is the conventional wisdom, that “a deep discount will get people to engage with my brand,” actually right? A few weeks ago, my counterpart in the UK published an analysis of how percentage off discounts influence open rates. Taking the cue from Karl, I wanted to expand this analysis into the U.S. market, paying special attention to Thanksgiving weekend. To begin, I gathered data on a few thousand mailings from our largest retail clients. To determine the baseline expected open rates, I averaged each brand’s performance in the 6 weeks prior to Black Friday. I then analyzed all the mailings sent on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, dividing the subject lines based on the appearance of a percentage off offer. Interestingly, percentage off offers were less prominent than I expected: And when percentages off were present… their values were all over the place: Higher volume doesn’t lead to improved performance Conventional wisdom would suggest that advertising a discount more frequently would lead to better performing discounts. The data, however, doesn’t support that idea. When I looked at volume distribution and relative performance for each advertised discount, I found a relatively strong negative correlation of -0.63. So the more frequently a discount was advertised, the worse it tended to perform. We can see this visually in the chart below: On average, advertising discounts did not significantly improve open rates. What happened? The first thing to note here is the wide spread in the data – some percentage off discounts worked very well! Overall, though, shouting about a discount wasn’t what convinced customers to open emails during the holidays. But maybe it wasn’t just the percentage off discounts that faltered this season – perhaps all opens were down? As you can see in the histogram above – this wasn’t the case. The average mailing not touting a percentage off discount did ever so slightly better than the baseline average. Still, the spread of data is very wide, with a lot of variation in results. It could be that the dispersion of results was a product of each brand’s initial baseline; brands that normally had great engagement would see positive gains for percentage off discounts while brands with poor engagement would see little to negative lifts, or vice versa. But this hypothesis was also proven incorrect, as the relative starting place for each brand versus the discount performances had a correlation approaching zero. No matter which way I sliced it, the performance of discounted subject lines were more or less random. Ultimately, this last point is the most important. The subject line, for all its ubiquity and focus, is probably a lot less influential than we tend to believe. Sure, a subject line can be optimized, carefully crafted to invoke the greatest lift in response possible, but the baseline expected performance is influenced by a much larger conversation – the one between the brand and its customers. If the brand relationship has been cultivated and refined through intelligent interactions and sophisticated targeting, the open rate is likely going to be higher. If every marketing message simply shouts, DISCOUNT, DISCOUNT, DISCOUNT, and there is no larger value-add, engagement probably won’t be great. Advertising a discount in a subject line might really help get people involved – or it might not. So what is the future of the subject line? Are they worth the disproportionate time and energy that marketing organizations tend to spend on them? Or should we recognize that their importance is probably minimal? The truth is, it’s a little bit of both. Subject lines are important – they are the first impression and often the first interaction of the day with a customer. But their importance is likely inversely related to the strength of the brand (the “from” line, if you will). The stronger the relationship is, the less important the subject line becomes. Maybe that’s the ideal – a perfect “from” name, one that tells you more about what’s inside the message than a subject line ever could. *Not a real stat Connect with Jacob Davis, Senior Analyst, on Twitter: @davisj2007.
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