When I moderated a panel titled In-Store Commerce Media: The Next Frontier, I asked the audience to take a moment of honesty with themselves. For all the innovation we’ve seen in retail media over the past few years, most of the momentum – and almost all the attention – has gone to online and onsite experiences. In-store commerce media is the physical giant quietly waiting to be activated.
But here’s the risk: if we treat in-store commerce media like a copy-paste job from digital, using the same measurement frameworks, creative playbooks, and campaign expectations, we will stall its growth before it even begins.
As one panelist bluntly put it: “Screens are not new. The only thing that’s new is our ability to measure them well.” That’s true, but it’s also only part of the story. The real challenge isn’t just infrastructure. It’s mindset.
Screens Don’t Equal Strategy
Digital transformation has a tendency to assume that hardware equals progress. But putting a smart shelf or large-format screen into a physical store doesn’t make it a media channel, not without context, creative relevance, and the right standards to support it.
Speaker after speaker echoed this. Michael Schuh from dunnhumby warned that if we chase 1:1 precision in-store the way we do online, “we’re going to fail.” In-store is a heads-up environment, he said, not a “heads-down” one. The person dragging three kids through the cereal aisle isn’t scrolling Instagram or watching a skippable pre-roll. They’re moving, distracted, and problem-solving in real time. So why are we trying to sell them digital-style micro-targeted banners?
We’ve Been Here Before
If this all sounds familiar, it should. The early years of retail media were flooded with banner ads and bloated promises. Onsite networks launched before measurement caught up. Creative was often templated and uninspired. Value was assumed, not proven.
In-store is now at risk of the same fate, only this time the environment is even more complex. Creative continuity, zone-based targeting, anonymized attribution, and campaign-level measurement are all possible. But without an agreed-upon framework for what good looks like, every retailer and brand will define success differently. That leads to confusion, not confidence. And confidence is what unlocks investment.
Measurement ≠ Precision
There was consensus on the panel that measurement is the cornerstone of in-store media’s future. But the debate was sharp: how precise does it really need to be?
Some panelists championed campaign-level attribution, more akin to TV-style models than digital clicks. Others pushed for shopper-level data to understand performance at the zone or placement level. But what stood out wasn’t which method was “right.” It was the lack of consistency.
As Marlow Nickell, CEO and Co-Founder of GroceryTV put it, “We’re obsessed with identifying a particular person. But we don’t need that to prove impact.” Instead, what we need is alignment: What does success look like? At what level of granularity? And how do we report that consistently across retailers and tech platforms?
IAB, alongside other standards bodies, can and should help answer those questions. If we don’t, every in-store campaign becomes a bespoke, one-off build—and that’s the opposite of scale.
The Mismatch Between Foot Traffic and Media Investment
If 80–90% of transactions still happen in physical stores, why does in-store commerce media remain an afterthought in most omnichannel plans?
The answer, as surfaced during the panel, is misalignment, not just between teams, but between where consumers are and where advertisers are spending. Several panelists noted that while the screens and content systems are improving, many national media plans still fail to account for the scale and influence of in-store touchpoints. And when in-store is included, it’s often bucketed under “shopper marketing” or “trade”, treated more as a conversion tactic than a media channel. That’s a problem.
Without a shift in planning logic, in-store media will continue to operate in isolation, funded by fragmented budgets and managed by disconnected teams. It’s not a question of technology readiness, it’s a question of whether we’re willing to update our mental model of what media is.
Let’s Not Copy—Let’s Create
The future of in-store commerce media doesn’t lie in replicating digital norms. It lies in building something new:
- New creative rules for motion, context, and attention.
- New measurement baselines that balance campaign lift with shopper insight.
- New planning models that integrate in-store with social, CTV, and DOOH into a single omnichannel framework.
We don’t need to reinvent the wheel, but we do need to stop dragging a digital one through a physical aisle. If we get it right, we’ll look back two years from now and marvel at how in-store media transformed from a novelty into a necessity. But only if we resist the urge to make it digital media with a price tag. Let’s not make the same mistakes twice.