Is 2025 The Year Of Retail Media Standardization?

Retail Media Standards: We’re still working on it!

The slogan needs to be refined. But demand for IAB-based retail media standards continues to grow.

A year ago, ad tech vendors led by startup Kevel created an outgroup to accelerate retail standardization, hoping to happen in 2024. The group later merged its work with the IAB Tech Lab.

Kevel and other retail advertising startups are behind the IAB standards, Kevel CEO James Avery he told AdExchanger at that time. “We just have a little more urgency to figure this out.”

Well, call it a Christmas miracle, because this month the IAB and IAB Europe published the final version of its first retail media standards. As a first step, these standards establish certain definitions and metrics that can be consistent across different retailers, such as the creation of clear zones within a physical store (exterior, entrance, checkout, aisles, etc.) and potential ad reporting metrics such as “gross impressions” as well as “opportunity to see” or “probability to see” ads.

So retail media standards are happening?

That. Retail media standards now exist, and advertisers and retail media networks can begin to adopt these common metrics and definitions.

But the problem is more difficult than standardization on the open web.

First, there is the simple fact that the stores themselves are different.

The IAB defines retail media as “digital native” campaigns linked to a real-world point of purchase. In other words, these standards are not for in-app or website sponsored product listings – which are fairly easy to standardize and automate. This is about how to evaluate all the marketing in and around the store. Which is probably more than you think.

If there are gas pumps or electric car charging stations outside or any type of display or billboard near the store, those out-of-home digital spots are retail media DPB ads. Audio ads from radio or streaming music in a store are DPB placements. Coinstar machines, shopping carts with displays, physical coupons, digital price tag offers, and cardboard aisle displays could fall under retail media and DPB ads.

In other words, there are monstrous differences between the types of inventory an advertiser could get from different retailers. This is why metrics such as “opportunity to see” or “likelihood to see” are new. advocated by marketers themselves, as a way of distinguishing it from metrics like “gross impressions”.

If a supermarket serves an ad on its new line of smart shopping carts and it is believed that the customer saw that ad, does that count the same as a small display ad on the Coinstar machine at the entrance to the store?

Retail reservation

Reaching consensus on definitions for even basic retail media metrics required a painstaking 18 months of work.

Unfortunately, this was the easy part.

Now the standards must be adopted and implemented by platforms and vendors.

Standardization is “easy to support,” Evan Hovorka, vice president of product and innovation for Albertsons Media Collective, the grocer’s retail media business, recently told AdExchanger.

Anyone can say they are in favor of lower taxes and more spending on public schools. But there are also disincentives to adopting retail media standards, which some retailers and ad tech vendors don’t mention.

Criteo, for example, will benefit from any rising tide in retail media. If the RMN standards mean more brands feel comfortable shifting shopper marketing budgets to ad tech, that’s generally a good thing for programmatic.

But Criteo also benefits from the current state of non-standardization. As the leader among independent retail ad networks (ie, not Google or Amazon), Criteo doesn’t really need standards. All taxonomies, creative formats and definitions for tracking and targeting exist within Crite. Smaller competitors in retail ad technology such as Kevel, CitrusAd and TripleLift benefit disproportionately from standardization, as advertisers are less likely to agree to an incumbent where it is simplified and a broad RMN network already exists.

Hovorka said one promising sign of standards catching on is LiveRamp’s recent adoption, which he said is important because, like Crite, LiveRamp is one of those vendors that can be said to benefit from a lack of standards. But LiveRamp has firmly embraced the IAB retail media standards, he added, meaning it will put its own “stamp of approval” on metrics and conversions from the new RMN standards.

Avoiding retail media standards could be a way for some platforms to “preserve their RMN business as a unique thing,” Hovorka said. And that strategy may have worked five years ago, he added.

But for CPG advertisers, the problem isn’t going away, he said. “Now we have to think of ourselves as an industry and work together to solve these problems.”