This is the second article in the Perspectives on Retail Media Series brought to you by the Retail Media Council.
Written by Kees de Jong, Managing Director of Uncommon Media
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Retail media is growing fast. That much is not in dispute. What is less discussed, at least openly, is the structural challenge sitting underneath that growth: retailers and media buyers are increasingly operating in the same market but speaking different languages, measuring different things, and in many cases, unable to meaningfully compare results across networks.
This is not a technology failure. It is what happens when a channel scales faster than the shared infrastructure needed to support it. And the gap is getting harder to ignore.
The data sovereignty problem most retailers underestimate
When a retailer connects its advertising inventory to external demand partners, it makes a trade. The nature of that trade varies considerably. Some networks pass elements of audience data directly in bid requests, others share only anonymised identifiers or attributes, others route transactions through data clean rooms that limit direct exposure but come with their own constraints, particularly around match rates. Hashed identifiers sit somewhere in between, offering a degree of protection while still enabling audience targeting across platforms.
None of these approaches is inherently wrong. Each involves a different set of trade-offs between reach, addressability, privacy, and control. The mechanism itself is rarely the issue. What matters is whether the retailer has a clear picture of which approach is in place, what data is moving as a result, and what the implications might be. In a fast-moving market, those details often get buried in implementation.
There is a cautionary parallel here. When programmatic advertising scaled through the 2010s, publishers were told that connecting to more demand partners meant more competition for their inventory and therefore better yields. Many did exactly that. What they did not fully grasp was that every connection was also a data connection, and that the platforms aggregating that data would eventually become more powerful than the publishers who supplied it. A generation of media owners gradually ceded control of their most valuable asset and spent the following decade trying to rebuild sovereignty they had not realised they were giving up.
Retailers are now stepping into the role of publishers and media owners. They have something the original publishers did not: the benefit of hindsight. The risk is not inevitable. But avoiding it requires deliberate choices, made early, about how data moves and on whose terms.
In practice:
For Retailers
For each active demand partner connection, the right questions are: how is audience data moving, under what contractual terms, and what are the permitted uses downstream? If a clean room is in place, what are the match rate implications for addressable inventory? These are not simple questions to answer internally. They typically cut across legal, technology, and commercial teams, and in many organisations nobody owns the full picture. That is normal, and it is precisely why getting clarity on this sooner rather than later is worth the effort, whether that comes from within or with outside help.
For Media Buyers
How a retail media network handles audience data has direct implications beyond data ethics. It affects targeting reliability, audience quality, and ultimately campaign performance. A network passing rich data in a bid request may offer stronger targeting but with different privacy trade-offs than one operating through a clean room with limited match rates. Understanding which model you are buying into, and what that means for delivery and results, is increasingly part of the due diligence a buyer needs to do before committing budget.
The interoperability gap: when the same campaign tells different stories
On the buy side, the conversation is different but equally challenging. A media agency planning across three or four retail media networks today is working with incompatible measurement outputs, inconsistent attribution windows, and audience definitions that vary by platform.
There is no consistent standard in practice. Although IAB chapters globally, including IAB US, IAB Europe and IAB Australia, have developed guidelines for metrics and measurement, adoption remains uneven. Initiatives such as the IAB Europe and IAB Australia Retail Media Measurement Certification programmes will help lift standards.
Comparing performance across networks usually requires manual reconciliation that consumes time and introduces error. That reconciliation burden currently falls almost entirely on the buyer, which is an unsustainable position as retail media grows as a channel.
More structurally, retail media sits at the intersection of two buyer types who have traditionally operated with different success metrics and limited reason to align: trade marketing and brand media. Trade buyers think in share of category, basket penetration, and promotional return. Media buyers think in reach, frequency, CPA, and incremental sales lift. Retail media forces both into the same conversation and bridging those two views from a single campaign dataset is something most retail media platforms are still working toward. Anyone who has tried to present the same campaign results to a trade director and a media agency in the same week will know exactly how that tension plays out.
The result is friction at the point of investment. Budgets stall not because the inventory lacks value but because the buyer cannot get a consistent, credible answer to a basic question: what did this actually do?
In practice:
For Retailers
The goal is reporting that speaks both languages from the same dataset, incremental sales and share of category for trade, reach, frequency, and CPA for media. Whether your platform can support that today is partly a capability question and partly a briefing question. Getting alignment on what each stakeholder actually needs to see, before the campaign goes live rather than after, removes a significant amount of downstream pain. If that conversation is hard to have internally, it is often easier with a neutral party in the room.
For Media Buyers
Developing an internal measurement framework that travels across retail media networks is the most practical near-term solution to a market gap that is not going to close quickly. That is an imperfect answer to a problem buyers did not create, and it is worth saying so plainly. In the absence of industry standards, the buyers who define their own consistent definitions of incrementality, attribution, and audience quality will be better positioned to evaluate performance honestly, have more productive conversations with retail media partners, and make a more credible case internally for where retail media sits in the plan.
What the market needs, practically
This is not a call for a single universal platform. Retailers will not, and should not, hand over their data infrastructure to one vendor. The answer is not consolidation. It is standardisation at the measurement and reporting layer, with sovereignty preserved at the data layer.
The industry needs agreed definitions. Incrementality, attribution windows, and audience taxonomy should not be proprietary outputs. If every network defines these differently, comparability is impossible and media buyers will continue to undervalue retail media relative to channels where the numbers are easier to read.
Most retail media networks are still building those foundations, getting measurement right, aligning internal teams, and producing reports that buyers can actually use. That is simply where the market is, and there is no shame in it.
In practice:
For Retailers
Getting your own measurement and reporting foundations right is the immediate priority. But that work does not have to happen in isolation. Industry bodies like the IAB exist precisely to help participants at every stage of maturity work through these challenges collectively, and the insights from networks that are still building are just as valuable to that process as those from the more established players. Engaging early means you help shape a framework that actually reflects market reality, rather than inheriting one built without you.
For Media Buyers
Formal standards will take time to mature across the industry. In the meantime, engaging with industry bodies like the IAB is one of the more direct ways buyers can influence what those standards look like when they do arrive. The channel will be defined either by the people actively shaping it or by those who inherited whatever emerged. Specialist advice is available on the near-term practical questions, and given how fast this space is moving, an external read on your current approach is worth the investment.
The opportunity underneath the friction
Retail media has something most digital advertising channels do not: genuine, largely deterministic, first-party purchase data. That is an extraordinarily powerful foundation, and building the infrastructure to make the most of it is genuinely hard work. It requires internal alignment that does not come easily, technology decisions that have long tails, and commercial conversations with partners that demand more sophistication than most vendor relationships.
The retailers who get there, who build the right data infrastructure, govern it carefully and present results in a language that works for both trade and media, will have a durable competitive advantage. And neither side needs to figure it out entirely on their own. The expertise exists in market, the problems while real are not novel, and what is often missing is simply the right framing to get everyone aligned on what good looks like. The networks that win long term will not be the biggest. They will be the ones buyers trust to give them a straight answer.