While brands increasingly demand greater transparency and standardization in retail media measurement, the retailer perspective often goes unheard.

That's why I was thrilled to read a new 'Retail Media Playbook' from the Path to Purchase Institute's Retail Media Guild, which has a section on why progress on measurement standards has been slower than many hoped – including commentary from retailers themselves. The Playbook features anonymized comments from retail media leaders across the industry, offering candid perspectives rarely shared publicly.

I'll pull out a few key themes from this report as well as my recent interviews with RMN leaders from the Home Depot and Sam's Club for my Forbes column.

The Birth and Evolution of Retail Media Networks

Many retail media networks begin as small initiatives within existing departments before evolving into standalone entities. Melanie Babcock told me how Home Depot's retail media journey began. In 2018 she was managing HD's social media business. "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.'"

This experimental approach is common, with many retail media efforts starting within marketing, e-commerce, or merchandising teams before gaining traction. Eventually, a more successful model emerges: Media Networks branded separately from the parent retailer to provide freedom to innovate. Some retailers create subsidiaries or independent units to operate their RMNs as self-contained businesses with their own P&L, enabling them to move quickly without the constraints typically faced by the larger organization.

The downside here is that “Retail media” can operate separately from corporate marketing, e-commerce, and data science groups. That fragmentation hampers consistent measurement practices and slows alignment around transparency.

Internal Priorities, Organizational Silos & Legacy Systems

But most retail platforms weren't originally designed for advertising measurement, creating significant technical challenges. As one retailer candidly admitted in the Retail Media Guild report:

"I work for a retailer that considers itself a tech company... different assets are owned by different parts of the business and it's not even that old — it's about 10 years old. But they were created at different times, and not always by people who ever assumed that they'd be used for advertising."

The reality is that many retailer platforms were never designed for robust ad tracking or closed-loop measurement, and retrofitting them is expensive and time-consuming. This retrofitting challenge was echoed by Melanie Babcock, who told me about Home Depot's decision to overhaul their tech stack:

"We looked at our existing tech stack, we didn't like the experience. A lot of us at Retail Media are former marketers and media buyers. We stepped back and thought, 'This is clunky and hard.'" Home Depot ultimately concluded "that we needed to own the majority of our tech stack so we could design it to meet the standards our suppliers expect."

Even if leaders want stronger measurement, engineering and analytics teams are often busy with core retail operations and higher-priority IT overhauls.

How universal can a 'standard' really be?

A fundamental challenge in standardizing retail media measurement is that different retailers serve vastly different purposes for brands, making universal metrics potentially misleading. Melanie Babcock of Home Depot explained this nuance:

"For example, faucets are a big deal for us. A supplier might introduce a new color trend exclusively at Home Depot. That might be a two-year exclusive to see how customers adopt the new color before going all in on a big product line. But at a mass retailer, the supplier might only list top-selling SKUs."

Her point is that the same brand might use Home Depot as an innovation testing ground for new products while using a mass retailer purely for volume sales of established items. These fundamentally different strategies make comparing ROI or other metrics across retailers meaningless without context. A campaign that appears to underperform at Home Depot by pure ROAS standards might be succeeding brilliantly at its actual objective of testing market acceptance for a new product line.

She emphasized that while standardization is important, context matters tremendously: "We don't want to be bespoke or out on our own. We want standardization, but there are differences among retailers."

This retailer-specific context makes it difficult to compare performance metrics directly. As one retail media leader noted in the P2PI report: "It would be great if we could standardize things across the board, but we just don't live in a world right now where Walmart and Wakefern measure the same way... You have to understand how they're measuring and contextualize that when you make strategy and decisions."

Transparency & Data-Sharing Concerns

Brands often distrust retailer-provided metrics. One brand marketer bluntly stated in the P2PI report: "I don't trust anything a retail media network shares with me because it's from their self-interest. It's the same way as the ROAS calculations can be different... I just don't think you can rely on the retailers' [reporting] because they're just going to give you data back in the way that's rosiest for them."

Incrementality measurement has become a particularly contentious focal point. While one retailer emphasized its importance—"To RMNs, I say incremental. I don't care about ROAS, I don't want to hear it ever. Tell me about the incremental people that are coming in"—brand teams often view these claims skeptically.

While e-commerce data is robust, much of retail still happens in-store, complicating efforts to prove that an ad truly led to an extra sale. The Retail Media Guild report notes that achieving accurate incrementality requires advanced data science, plus cross-platform measurement (including in-store transactions), which not all RMNs can provide.

Finally, some retailers hesitate to open up raw data or more transparent reporting because it might highlight underperformance or prompt brands to reduce spend.

Is it really worth it?

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 spoke with an industry consultant last week who was working on a project with a regional grocer who was focused on monetizing their data assets. This grocer was making "single digit millions" in revenue from selling their data into partnerships like Oracle Advertising, Circana and the like to match online and offline audiences and generate revenue.

Is single-digit millions per year enough of a carrot to ask a retailer to invest significant capex in upgrading their core systems? Maybe (it does essentially all dropped to the bottom line, and in this economy....), but on a quarterly earnings cycle, it may be tough to justify.

This is where technology like Real Time Bidding, and the new interest of players like Microsoft and Google in becoming advertising demand aggregators may help to push the industry forward. A single grocer may not have the appetite to make all this investment alone, but if another party can bring in the demand and grade the homework, it may be worthwhile.

The commentary in the Retailer's Guild report shows that it's not a lack of desire from retailers to improve but a challenge of aligning internal teams, upgrading legacy systems, and adopting consistent metrics while remaining clear-eyed on the upside.