This piece was originally published in May 2025. Nine months on, the measurement standardization debate hasn't been settled — if anything, it's gotten louder. I've revisited and updated this article with community reactions from the original post and insights from my subsequent analysis.
Everyone has their own definition of the perfect bolognese sauce. To parents of young children, its a way to sneak in an extra serve of veggies. Some people play with the ratio of pork to beef. Italian purists demand a splash of milk at the end.
Decisions around what goes into your bolognese sauce and how its prepared may depend on your family history, flavor preferences, or even what type of equipment you have. With all these variables, everyone seems to make their bolognese a bit different.
That's kinda what's happening in retail media networks today. All these retailers offer "retail media," yet the flavor profile and nutritional value are wildly different—with measurement standards as varied as those home-cooked meals.
Brands say they want retail media standards. Retailers say it's too hard. Do they kind of have a point?
The Different Recipes: Why RMNs Operate Differently
Just as every home cook has their own bolognese recipe, every retail media network has developed its own approach to advertising, measurement, and reporting.
This isn’t by design. It stems from fundamental differences in their business models, history, technology infrastructure, and position in the market.
For many smaller RMNs, their tech stack resembles off-the-shelf ingredients—assembling the Kirkland brand of meat with a bottle of Prego sauce. It's technology that gets the job done. But for their regular customers, they offer special-order bolognese (direct ad buys) made exactly how these big spenders want it. These direct buys might generate enough revenue, and align pretty cleanly with the retailer's core business (actually selling stuff), that there's little incentive to pony up the big bucks on infrastructure to significantly improve their standard ‘public’ recipe.
Technical differences abound as well. The bi-annual Sponsored Products Benchmark reports from Pentaleap show significant variation in how effectively retailers can serve sponsored ads for complex search queries. As searches get longer and more specific (and more valuable to brands targeting niche customers), some platforms maintain high ad coverage while others drop off dramatically.
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The Diner's Dilemma: Brand Challenges
Brands face the difficult task of navigating a fragmented RMN landscape. As retail media spending growth is expected to decelerate, performance gaps will be even more under the microscope. Brands are already voting with their wallets—on average, they only advertise on 6-8 RMNs, despite dozens being available in each category.
The call for standardization from brands is borne out of two major issues: frustration around transparency, and a desire to compare ‘apples to apples’ and ensure their media dollars are spent in the most performant channel.
On transparency, Jordan Witmer, Managing Director of Retail Media at Salt XC, shared how one major retail network responded when advertisers started identifying and opting out of poor-performing placements based on viewability metrics. Instead of improving these placements, the network simply removed advertisers' ability to select specific placements entirely, forcing them to buy bundled packages that obscured the poor performers.
The Path to Purchase Institute produces an annual study which reveals just how wide the perceived differences between RMNs have become. The data shows a stark divide between industry leaders and the rest of the pack.
Top-Tier Networks (Amazon and Walmart) - 2025 ratings
- 50-70% "Excellent/Very Good" ratings across core metrics
- Strong data transparency (only 14% "Fair/Poor" for Amazon)
- Consistently high ROI satisfaction
Contrast that with the lower tier - 2025 ratings
- H-E-B: 60% "Fair/Poor" on measurement
- Dollar General: 57% "Fair/Poor" on measurement, 79% "Fair/Poor" on ROI
- BJ's: 70% "Fair/Poor" in both measurement and ROI
- Albertsons: 65% "Fair/Poor" in data sharing
- Ahold Delhaize: 67% "Fair/Poor" in ROI
But pleasingly, comparing 2025 to 2026, some of the retailers who were lagging on measurement metrics have shown marked improvement in the eyes of brands.
Network
Metric
2025 Fair/Poor %
2026 Fair/ Poor %
H-E-B
Measurement
60
55
Dollar General
ROI
79
42
BJ’s
Measurement
70
33
Albertsons
Data sharing
65
43
Ahold Delhaize
ROI
67
64
The Chef's Challenge: Why Standardization is Difficult
Although brands want to compare “apples to apples”, some retailers are pushing back on the premise of broad standardization.
Melanie Babcock, the former head of Home Depot’s Orange Apron Media pointed out in an interview I did with her for Forbes that brands might have completely different strategic objectives across different retail partners—especially specialty retailers. "For example, a faucet manufacturer might have 200 SKUs at Home Depot, and only 10 at a mass retailer," she said. "If the brand is testing a new product line or color trend in one retail environment, their return on ad spend (ROAS) might naturally be lower than in a channel where they're only promoting proven bestsellers."
While brands understandably push for greater consistency, retailers face legitimate challenges in standardizing their approaches. The obstacles aren't just stubbornness or profit-seeking—they're rooted in technical limitations, organizational structures, and business realities.
- Legacy Systems Weren't Built for Advertising
Many retail media networks begin as small initiatives within existing departments. Melanie Babcock described how Home Depot's retail media journey began in 2018: "I noticed a lot of retargeting traffic available... I thought, 'I wonder if our suppliers would pay for this, to retarget customers who abandoned their pages.’" Thus kicked off a lucrative business for Home Depot, but one they have also spent the past couple of years attempting to consolidate across offline and online.
This experimental approach is common, with many retail media efforts starting within marketing, e-commerce, or merchandising teams before gaining traction. The downside is that "retail media" often operates separately from corporate marketing, e-commerce, and data science groups, hampering consistent measurement practices.
- An Economic Reality Check
The reality is, retailers are at different stages of measurement readiness because their retail media business may be more or less significant to the core business. I heard recently of a regional grocer making "single digit millions" in revenue from selling their data. Is that enough incentive to invest significant capital in upgrading core systems? It may be tough to justify that oversight and capital expense. Meanwhile, hiring another retail media salesperson for direct media buys could be more palatable.
- The Audience Wants Different Dishes
HEB's RMN head, Sean Ransenberg, posted a thoughtful comment on one of my recent articles: "It is going to be extremely difficult for retailers to provide 'standardization' when CPGs aren't in agreement on how they want to measure (retail) media. Internally, various CPG teams have differing preferences on measurement methodologies."
He points out that CPG sales teams want pre-post analysis, while shopper marketing wants closed loop and matched market analysis, and the brand teams want to run a Marketing Mix Model.
This is the sentiment that the IAB’s head of commerce, Collin Colburn, echoed in a speech to marketers last year:
"Brands have contributed to these challenges because they'll ask for custom metrics, reports, attribution windows from retailers. These requests perpetuate the very problems everyone claims they want to solve."
And Vai Anand, Senior Director of Data Science at Dollar General Media Collective, told me that he sees this constantly. Traditional CPG marketers are deeply familiar with marketing mix modeling but struggle with incrementality concepts, he says. So even when Dollar General implements gold-standard testing, they spend time justifying their approach instead of proving value.
Brands say they want comparability while actively undermining it by pushing for bespoke reporting.
The whole table wants bolognese, but one wants gluten-free pasta, one wants the pasta well-cooked while everyone else wants al dente, and the child at the table needs it to be served lukewarm. The ingredients may be the same, but it needs to be customized to their palate.
What can history tell us about the current challenges in retail media?
The kitchen says that the diners are too picky and demanding. And it may be unfair to expect a nutritional label for the meal coming out of the kitchen. But the call for standardization has been borne from experiences where brands have been told, “just trust me” and had their fingers burned.
As retail industry analyst Andrew Lipsman says, "Dollars Follow Measurement."
Only when Facebook moved to a performance medium circa 2012 did the ad dollars really surge.
And between ’06 and ’12, search engines handled their measurement standards differently, sparking a similar standards debate. Ultimately Bing adopted Google-like ad mechanics.
Advertisers crave transparency and were all too happy to shift ad spend, even when that resulted in a near monopoly.
What I've Reported Since
Since publishing this original piece in May 2025, I've spent a good deal of time digging into the retailer side of this story — and the picture is more nuanced than "retailers are dragging their feet."
In a piece for WARC in October 2025, I explored why the IAB's measurement guidelines — released in 2024 — still haven't seen wide adoption. The short answer: everyone shares the blame. The largest networks see little reason to push for industry-wide standards when they're already winning the budget. One senior leader told me they felt like mid-tier networks were asking advanced players to "dumb down" their capabilities. Meanwhile, brands are actively undermining the comparability they claim to want by requesting custom metrics, bespoke attribution windows, and one-off reports from each retailer.
The technical gaps are real, too. Identity fragmentation and tech stacks cobbled together from non-retail-native partners all make standardized reporting genuinely difficult — not just politically inconvenient. But as I wrote at the time: some of this is politics, not physics. Refusing to share exposure logs in a clean room is a choice. If a network wants premium budgets, it needs to provide premium proof.
And the data still points to measurement as a top-three priority. The Skai x Stratably 2026 State of Retail Media Study (n=162) asked brands what would accelerate their retail media investment. The top three answers: more sales/revenue (70%), improved overall profitability (54%), and better measurement (52%). Standardization across retailers, notably, came in at just 15%.
That gap tells you something. Brands care about proof that it works more than they care about everyone measuring the same way. The write-in responses reinforce this: "Measurement is opaque today and inconsistent across RMNs, hard to understand what's working vs not." It's not standardization for its own sake — it's standardization as a means to confidence.
Conclusion: The Bolognese Will Never Taste the Same Everywhere
The retail media landscape shows that parties on both sides are still figuring it out — and will be for a while.
For brands, the path forward probably looks like: focusing on the RMNs that deliver consistent value for your specific objectives, judging networks by business outcomes rather than getting lost in the weeds of inconsistent metrics, and adapting strategies to each platform's strengths rather than trying to force identical campaigns across every network.
For retailers, it means investing in measurement capabilities and transparency — even if perfect standardization isn't on the horizon — and being honest about what makes your offering genuinely different, rather than pretending to be something you're not.
The industry will move toward greater standardization over time, just as other digital advertising channels have. But if the Skai x Stratably data is any guide, brands aren't going to wait around for that. They'll invest where they can see proof of performance. As Lipsman's line goes: dollars follow measurement. The retailers who figure that out first will be the ones cooking for a full house. The rest will find themselves with empty tables.
