Retail Media’s Next Phase Depends on Buyer Confidence
Retail media has moved from a promising tactic to major media infrastructure. Circana projects global retail media ad spend will reach $280 billion by 2029, and the channel is already expanding well beyond retailer-owned digital properties: 20% of spend now goes to off-site channels, retail media CTV spend has reached $6.33 billion, up 41% year over year, and in-store retail media is expected to exceed $1 billion by 2029. That in-store figure is not incidental; brick-and-mortar still represents 52% to 89% of sales, depending on category.
The implication is clear: retail media is no longer a discrete channel that can be managed as a set of isolated buys. It is an omnichannel commerce layer, spanning onsite, offsite, CTV, social commerce, in-store environments and other commerce-enabled media. That expansion creates more opportunities to reach consumers, but it also makes the buyer’s job more complex. The question is no longer only whether retail media drove sales. It is what kind of value it created: Did it generate new demand or capture demand already in-market? Did it reach new buyers or influence existing ones? Did it shift preference, drive store behavior, improve conversion or contribute to longer-term customer value?
This matters because proximity to purchase is powerful, but it is not the same as persuasion. Arc Worldwide’s shopper sentiment research, conducted with 2,500 U.S. shoppers across 20 categories and 10 retailers, found that an average of 24% of consumers say they have “no preference” for a particular retail store. Retail media may help brands appear closer to the moment of decision, but that does not automatically mean consumers feel more confident, more loyal or more inclined to choose differently.
That is why relevance has become so central to the retail media proposition. Data by Mastercard showed that 71% of consumers expect personalized interactions and 76% are frustrated when experiences are generic or disconnected; Mastercard also noted that 8 in 10 customers are not paying attention because much of what they see feels irrelevant. Retail media should be well positioned to address this problem. It has rich signals, useful context and a closer connection to shopping behavior than many other channels. But relevance cannot simply be assumed because a campaign uses retailer data. It has to be demonstrated through outcomes that matter: incremental behavior, reduced friction, stronger preference, new customer growth or value beyond the immediate transaction.
Once retail media is expected to do more than capture an immediate sale, measurement becomes more consequential. Buyers need to understand not only whether a purchase followed an exposure, but what role the media actually played in the decision. Did it change behavior, or simply receive credit for behavior that was already likely to happen? That distinction is difficult to make in a fragmented environment. Circana noted that two-thirds of marketing leaders believe there is a measurement problem, and Merkle illustrated why with a simple $129 purchase: depending on the attribution model, the same sale could be credited evenly across touchpoints, weighted toward the final interaction or split between the first and last exposure. The purchase did not change. The explanation of what caused it did.
The ARF’s Retail Media Network Standardization Project was designed to bring more structure to this complexity from the network side. The study examined 16 RMNs, including eight of the top ten by U.S. market share, and found that offerings are converging faster than measurement practices. Only 44% of RMNs reported closed-loop reporting, despite closed-loop measurement being one of retail media’s central value propositions, and only 25% reported real-time data monitoring or analytics. The report also provides frameworks for understanding where closed-loop measurement is strongest, how incrementality maturity varies and why similarly named metrics may not be comparable across networks. Its practical guidelines help marketers ask better questions about reporting versus measurement, measurement coverage across environments, attribution windows, incrementality, transparency and validation.
But that is only one side of the problem. If the first step is clarifying what RMNs offer and how their measurement systems work, the next step is understanding how buyers actually use that information. Marketers and agencies still have to allocate budgets, compare proposals, interpret performance, align internal teams and explain results internally. That is why the ARF and The Ad Club are collaborating on a retail media buy-side research initiative examining how marketers, agencies and media buyers plan, buy, evaluate and integrate retail media. The research will focus on the questions buyers are navigating now: ownership, budget allocation, RMN comparison, confidence in reported metrics, incrementality, in-store media and cross-network performance. Findings will be presented at The Ad Club’s Commerce Conference in New York on September 15.
Author
Tracy Adams, PhD
Senior Director of Research & Insights
ARF
SOURCES
Adams, T., Donato, P., & Zhang, S. (in press). The ARF Retail Media Network Standardization Project: Capabilities, metrics & practical guidelines. ARF.
Bustos, J. A. (2026, May 12). Enabling unified retail media measurement. ARF Commerce & Shopper Intelligence conference, Chicago, IL. ARF.
Harris, E., & DeGaris, L. (2026, May 12). Arc Shopper Sentiment Study: Decoding the emotions of shopping to win in retail. ARF Commerce & Shopper Intelligence conference, Chicago, IL. ARF.
Moser, J. (2026, May 12). Why relevancy is the new performance engine. ARF Commerce & Shopper Intelligence conference, Chicago, IL. ARF.
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