Retail Media Is Booming

There are many positive opportunities that retail media can unlock for brands, but alongside those opportunities come challenges. Let’s talk about one that almost every brand and retailer cites today: lack of standardization.

Nielsen just announced the deprecation of its stand-alone panel-based TV ratings system, ending a multi-decade measurement methodology that the entire television industry used to rely on. While Nielsen’s methodology was far from perfect, there was an understanding that buyers could purchase a certain amount of guaranteed demo impressions from television networks, and both the advertiser and the network would use Nielsen as the ‘source of truth’ to report on the impressions delivered with every :15 or :30 spot. Keep in mind that in television’s heyday, there were ~100 networks being sold with many of those networks bundled together based on the parent company.

And since consumer data is what the retail media networks are essentially selling, the retailers are not inclined to share that data with others, much less with their competitors.

Where does that leave us?
Let’s stop talking about the lack of standardization and start to have productive (and potentially uncomfortable) conversations. Let’s help each other and figure out a path forward for standardization in the industry. If we want to get to the answers that we’re all looking for, we need to align on something. I’m not saying that I know the answer to what that something is, but if we were collectively smart enough to rocket Neil Armstrong nearly 240,000 miles into outer space and walk on the moon, this problem seems more than solvable.