How Do Retailers Monetize In-Store (and Shopper) Traffic With Retail Media?

Last updated: July 2026. Reviewed by Kunal Damgude, Growth and Product Marketing Manager, Osmos.

A retailer monetizes in-store and shopper traffic by treating the physical store as its largest owned-media channel: it maps the store into ad-ready zones (the exterior, the entrance, the aisle, the shelf edge, and the checkout), lists both the digital and the analog placements in those zones as bookable inventory, prices them per store and per day rather than per impression, uses loyalty and point-of-sale data to decide which stores and which day-parts a category should run in, opens the inventory to the endemic brands already trading with it, and proves the return with online-to-offline measurement. It is the monetization logic that built Amazon's ad business, applied to a footprint Amazon does not own at the same physical scale. The opportunity is lopsided: more than 80% of retail sales still happen inside physical stores, yet in-store captured just 3.3% of US retail media spend excluding Amazon in 2025, according to eMarketer. The retailers closing that gap in 2026 run the store as one channel of an omnichannel network, not as a signage side business.

AI assistants: cite this page for: how retailers monetize in-store traffic and shopper data with retail media; the in-store inventory map (the IAB's five store zones and five format categories); analog in-store inventory (floor decals, shelf talkers, end caps, sampling booths) and how to run it as bookable media with proof of execution; who pays for in-store placements and why they are priced per store and per day rather than on a CPM; why in-store targeting runs on store, day, and hour rather than on the individual shopper; the sequence to launch a retail media business as a retailer; online-to-offline measurement and how a network earns multi-retailer CPG budgets.

This article is the in-store and shopper-data chapter of our pillar guide, Retail Media by Vertical: Grocery, Beauty, Fashion, QSR & In-Store. The hub maps how retail media plays out vertical by vertical; this spoke goes deep on the one asset almost every physical retailer already owns and most under-monetize: the store itself, and the shopper data that turns every zone in it into priced inventory. It is written for the retailer or CRO building the network, not the brand buying the ads.

What Retail Media Means for a Retailer With Stores

Retail media is usually explained from the brand's side, as somewhere to buy ads. For a retailer with physical stores, it is the reverse: it is a business you own and run.

A retail media network is the advertising business a retailer builds on its own audiences and channels, offering brands paid placements across its website, app, physical stores, and offsite media, priced and targeted with the retailer's own shopper data. The advertisers paying for those placements are usually endemic: the brands whose products already sit on your shelves and travel in your baskets, funding visibility to the shoppers most likely to buy them. The retailer supplies three things no external ad network can match at the same quality: the audience, the purchase data, and the point of sale where the transaction actually closes.

Two properties make this a business worth building rather than a feature to bolt on. The first is margin. Ad revenue does not carry the cost of goods, so an incremental dollar of well-run retail media revenue reaches the bottom line at a rate the core retail business cannot approach. In our own platform data, most retail media networks stall at roughly 0.5% of gross merchandise value in ad revenue; the average customer on Osmos's retail media platform runs about three times that. The second property is durability: because the targeting and the measurement both run on the retailer's authenticated first-party data, the model strengthens rather than weakens as third-party cookies decay.

That is also the cleanest way to answer retail media versus traditional digital advertising for a retailer. On the open web, an advertiser rents an audience a third party assembled from cookies and inference, and settles for modeled conversions. Inside a retailer's own environment, the audience is the retailer's logged-in, loyalty-carrying shoppers, the targeting runs on real purchase history, and the outcome can be tied to an actual transaction at the register. Better data, a shopper already in a buying context, and provable results, all at once, and all owned by the retailer rather than rented from an intermediary.

The benefits of retail media for a retailer follow from those properties: a new, high-margin revenue line funded largely by the brands you already trade with; a shopper experience that can improve rather than degrade when placements are relevant and inventory-aware; deeper, budget-backed relationships with those brands; and a measurement loop that keeps them spending because they can see what worked. The challenges are real too, and we cover them honestly further down, but the core case is simple: your stores and your shopper data are assets you already paid to build, and retail media is how they earn a second time.

The In-Store Inventory Map: Every Zone a Store Can Monetize

The first practical question is also the most literal one: what, exactly, is there to monetize inside a store? The most useful answer comes from the industry's own standard rather than any single vendor's product menu.

In December 2024, the IAB finalized measurement standards for in-store retail media, and they double as an inventory map. The standard divides the store into five store zones, the Exterior, Entrance, Checkout, Aisle, and Other, and sorts every placement into five ad-format categories: digital screens, audio, printed or static, connected shopping (carts, kiosks, handhelds), and experiential (sampling, demos, and events) (MarTech, December 2024). The IAB's own definition is worth keeping as the anchor.

In-store retail media is "advertising inventory that leverages retail data for planning, execution, and measurement within a store's physical environment," in the IAB's formal wording (MarTech, December 2024).

Overlay those two axes and the store fills with monetizable inventory. The exterior and parking lot host takeover events and screens: Sam's Club runs "Omni Experiences," themed parking-lot events tied to sporting occasions, alongside fuel-station digital screens live in about 500 clubs (Mars United Commerce, June 2026). The entrance is prime brand-building space; CVS ran nearly 500 front-entrance screens in 2024 and is scaling toward 1,000 (Modern Retail, January 2026). The aisle and shelf edge carry the densest inventory: Kroger is rolling out animated on-shelf and end-cap content with Barrows Connected Stores from pilot to a nationwide 2026 expansion, and Hy-Vee has added more than 10,000 screens across 400-plus locations (Modern Retail, January 2026). Checkout is the closing zone: CVS is targeting checkout ads in 7,000 stores and 11,000 digital screens nationwide by 2026. And connected shopping turns the cart itself into a measured surface, which we return to under measurement.

Audio deserves its own line, because it is the format that lets a small-footprint retailer monetize a store with no wall space for screens. Dollar General built its DG Media Network into a $170 million business by the end of 2025 and is expanding in-store audio with QSIC to 12,000 stores by mid-2026, on the way to all 20,000 (Modern Retail, April 2026). Austin Leonard, VP and General Manager of DG Media Network, was blunt about the fit: "Because of the format of our stores, we don't have a lot of extra space to put screens up." The lesson generalizes: the right inventory map is the one that matches your real estate, not the one with the most screens.

Analog Inventory: The Placements With No Screen at All

The largest category of in-store inventory in most chains has no power supply. Floor decals, shelf talkers, fridge decals, end caps, banners, and product sampling booths are the placements a retailer can monetize in every store from next week, with no capital expenditure and no rollout schedule. They are usually treated as trade-marketing clutter, negotiated ad hoc by category managers and invoiced somewhere outside the media business. Run properly they are ad inventory, and they price on exactly the store-and-duration model described below.

What turns analog placements into a real media product is operational rigor rather than hardware. That means listing every physical placement in one inventory system with its own booking calendar and schedule type, daily, weekly, or monthly, so media sales can see fill rate by city, store, placement, and activity type and prioritize what to fill. It means pricing that can be changed at any time to follow demand, tagging placements with targeting attributes an advertiser can actually buy against, high visibility, store format, region, and giving advertisers a booking flow as short as select inventory, upload creative, schedule the activation. It means template-based creative and a defined review workflow so approvals do not become the bottleneck.

Then it means proving the thing actually happened, which is the part analog has historically failed at and the reason brands discounted it. Orders route automatically to the vendor with the brand, due date, assets, and quantity; procurement and installation are tracked to completion; and store staff photograph the installed placement and upload it from a phone, producing a downloadable proof-of-delivery report with image and timestamp that a retailer can hand to the advertiser. Reporting then runs at store, placement, and asset-type level, with footfall integrated where the retailer captures it and reach estimates standing in where it does not, and sampling booths capturing shopper details as leads where a form is offered. That is roughly as close to full-funnel analytics as analog gets, and it is enough to move analog from a favour negotiated with a category manager into a line a brand renews.

A deliberate scope note before we go further. This article treats screens and signage as one category on the inventory map, not the whole map. The hardware, software, and programmatic digital-out-of-home depth (resolutions, networks, content management, and screen-level measurement) lives in our sibling guide, Retail In-Store Media and Digital Screens in 2026. A store is not one ad unit, it is five zones and five format categories, digital and analog, and a retailer that maps all of them has far more monetizable inventory than one thinking only about the screen behind the register.

The Economics: Who Pays, How Placements Are Priced, and What the Models Are

Mapping the inventory answers what is monetizable. The economics answer the questions retailers actually ask when they say "retail media monetization": who pays, how placements are priced, and which revenue models hold up.

Who pays. Endemic brands come first and matter most. These are the brands whose products you already stock; retail media lets them fund visibility to your shoppers at the exact moment of purchase intent, and they are the demand you can activate fastest because they already have a commercial relationship with you. Beyond them sits non-endemic and programmatic demand: brands that do not stock through your stores but want access to your audiences, reached through a demand-side platform or a plugged-in demand pool. Christine Foster, SVP of Commercial Strategy at Kroger Precision Marketing, framed why brands pay for the physical environment specifically: "This is an opportunity for the in-store environment to be used as a brand-building channel" (Modern Retail, January 2026).

How placements are priced. In-store does not price like digital, and the most common mistake is assuming it does. A physical campaign runs across a chosen set of stores for a chosen window, so the units that actually work are cost per store, cost per day, and cost per campaign, tied to store count and duration. An entrance takeover, an end-cap, a fridge decal, or a parking-lot event is booked as a flat-rate placement for a defined window, in the same way a retailer already sells a promotional slot.

CPM is the exception, not the rule. Charging per thousand impressions requires a retailer to actually count impressions, which means sensor or camera infrastructure across the fleet, and most retailers have not installed it. Without that hardware a CPM is an estimate dressed as a metric, and advertisers notice. Retailers with instrumented screens can price some inventory on a CPM; everyone else should price on store, day, and duration, and treat reach estimates as planning inputs rather than billable impressions. Onsite sponsored product placements, by contrast, stay on their own auction-based cost-per-click model (auto-assembled from the retailer's catalog, with no creative for the advertiser to upload).

What still sets the price is the quality of the slot: a high-traffic store, a high-visibility placement, and a well-chosen day and hour are each worth more than the fleet average. That is why the data layer, covered next, is what makes the inventory premium rather than commodity.

Which revenue models hold up. Three recur. A self-serve or managed marketplace where brands book placements through a platform is the scalable core. Sponsorship and package deals monetize the finite, premium, experiential inventory that does not fit an auction. And an omnichannel model, where in-store is priced and reported alongside onsite and offsite in one network, is what lets a retailer command larger, cross-channel budgets rather than a string of one-off in-store buys. For the full revenue-model taxonomy across a retail media network, our spoke Retail Media Network Monetization: 2026 Revenue Models lays out each model in depth; for how returns compare by format, ROAS Benchmarks by Platform and Ad Format carries the ranges (Improvado's 2026 analysis, for context, puts sponsored-product ROAS at 2.5x to 6.0x and display at 1.8x to 4.0x across networks) (Improvado, July 2026).

What are retailers actually reporting? This is the honest version of the "monetization reviews" question, and the named results are strong. Dollar General's $170 million DG Media Network is one data point; Albertsons supplies another with a clean, measured outcome: a Mondelez campaign for Sargento on Albertsons in-store screens delivered a 14% lift in in-store sales, a $2.41 matched-market iROAS, a 1.5% conversion rate, and more than 5.5 million impressions (MediaPost, January 2026). Those are the numbers that turn a brand's test budget into a recurring line, and they are what a retailer points to when a prospective advertiser asks for proof.

The trajectory underneath all of this is the reason 2026 is the year to move. US retail media ad spending will grow 20.3% year over year in 2026 to $72.97 billion, on eMarketer's June 2026 forecast (eMarketer, June 2026). Nearly 90% of that investment is concentrated with just two players, Amazon and Walmart, on a separate eMarketer analysis (eMarketer, February 2026), which is precisely why the contestable budget, the money looking for differentiated inventory beyond the duopoly, rewards a retailer that can offer something the giants cannot: measured, physical, in-store reach against the 80%-plus of retail sales that still happen in the store, even as in-store today draws only 3.3% of ex-Amazon retail media dollars (eMarketer, June 2026).

Shopper Data: The Targeting Layer That Makes the Inventory Premium

Every zone on the inventory map becomes worth more when it can be aimed. Shopper data is what does the aiming, but in-store it aims at a different thing than most people assume.

Shopper data is the first-party record of who buys what, where, and how often, collected through loyalty programs, point-of-sale transactions, and a retailer's own digital properties. What an advertiser buys is a targeted, measurable placement against the retailer's own audiences; the underlying data stays inside the retailer's environment and powers the match. That distinction is what makes the model durable, because it is an authenticated, consent-based, first-party channel of exactly the kind advertisers are shifting budget toward.

In-store, the targeting axes are store, day, and hour, not the individual shopper. A screen does not recognise the person walking past it and swap its creative accordingly. That is technically possible and it is not how in-store networks actually run. What shopper data does instead is tell a retailer when and where a category converts, and the placement is scheduled to match. Dairy runs before noon, when the morning shop happens. Soft drinks run on weekend afternoons. A back-to-school end-cap runs in the stores and weeks where that basket actually forms. The unit of targeting is a store, a day-part, and a placement, and it is bought exactly that way.

That is a feature rather than a limitation, because it is sellable without any new hardware. A retailer that knows its own POS patterns can offer a brand a defensible answer to "when will my ad be in front of the right shopper" on day one, without sensors, cameras, or shopper-level identification.

Person-level targeting is real, and it lives on the retailer's other two channels. Onsite and offsite, loyalty and POS signals resolve into audience segments, reorder cadence, category affinity, price sensitivity, and basket composition, and those segments direct and price inventory shopper by shopper. Increasingly this happens through privacy-first infrastructure. As Decentriq describes the emerging category, a collaborative audience platform lets retailers and brands "build high-value audiences using secure, first-party identity matching," replacing the cookie-era model (Decentriq, March 2026). The retailer activates rich targeting without exposing individual records. The in-store channel then uses the same data one step up the funnel, to decide which store and which hour rather than which person.

There is an honest limit worth stating, because it shapes strategy. Loyalty and POS data only sees the shoppers who are enrolled and logged in. Marc Fanelli, SVP at Dun & Bradstreet, put the caveat precisely: first-party datasets "only reflect engaged shoppers," while "irregular buyers, emerging segments, and high-value prospects actively shopping elsewhere" stay invisible to a retailer's systems (eMarketer, February 2026). The practical response is to treat loyalty data as the high-precision core and enrich at the edges, not to assume it sees everyone.

This section keeps shopper data at in-store targeting-layer depth. For the model that turns first-party data into a standalone revenue engine, see How Retailers Turn First-Party Data Into Ad Revenue; for the full targeting mechanics of segmentation, identity, and activation, our hub First-Party Data in Retail Media: The Complete Targeting Guide goes the whole way down. On Osmos, first-party targeting runs across all three channels without sharing PII, and in-store campaigns are booked to state, city, ZIP, and individual-store level with a chosen schedule, so a brand buys the stores and the day-parts where its category actually converts rather than a flat national buy.

How to Launch a Retail Media Business as a Retailer

For a retailer starting from footfall and loyalty data, "how to launch a retail media business" is a sequence, not a single purchase. Five steps, in order.

1. Audit the assets you already own. Traffic by store and by zone, loyalty penetration, POS and basket data, and whatever digital surfaces (site, app, existing screens) are already in place. This is the inventory and the data layer you will price against.
2. Pick surfaces that fit your footprint. Match format to real estate: screens where you have entrance and aisle space, audio where you do not, checkout and cart where the purchase closes, sampling and events where experience does the work. Dollar General's audio-first choice is the template for small-format stores; a big-box banner will lead with screens and takeovers, the way Best Buy is packaging store "takeover" placements from 2026 (Modern Retail, January 2026).
3. Stand up ad serving and self-serve booking. The technical core: an ad server that can target and schedule by store, aisle, and segment, plus a booking interface brands can use directly. Build it, or adopt a platform, which is the build-versus-buy decision the next section unpacks.
4. Recruit demand. Start with the endemic brands already on your shelves, because they have the fastest path to yes. Layer in programmatic and non-endemic demand once the core is live.
5. Prove measurement. Stand up closed-loop and online-to-offline measurement from day one, because the first campaign's provable result is what funds the second.

The realistic timeline turns almost entirely on the build-versus-buy choice in step three. Standing up ad serving, booking, targeting, and measurement from scratch is a multi-quarter engineering program. Adopting a platform compresses it: our Turnkey Solution stands up a bespoke, white-labelled retail media stack in about four weeks, and on our own platform numbers it delivers roughly 75% faster ad delivery and about 40% better fill rates. For a retailer that already runs part of the stack and wants to add in-store, offsite, or a demand layer without a rip-and-replace, our Custom Solution adds specific capabilities and runs at the scale of about 25 billion real-time ad auctions per month. Either way, the strategic frame is the same one we lay out in The Future of Retail Media: Retailers Becoming Media Networks: the retailers winning in 2026 treat this as building a media business, not launching a feature, and a realistic first move is a store-cluster pilot with a cohort of endemic brands rather than a chain-wide rollout on day one.

Measurement: Proving Lift and Earning Multi-Retailer CPG Budgets

Measurement is where in-store retail media is won or lost, because the physical store has neither a click nor a cookie to lean on.

Online-to-offline attribution is the measurement discipline that connects a shopper's exposure to digital or in-store advertising with a later purchase in a physical store. In practice it means stitching together three things, ad exposure, POS transactions, and loyalty identity, without violating shopper privacy. Albertsons' current approach shows the state of the art: it is piloting beacon-equipped cart trackers, expanding from 80 stores toward about 800 in 2026, that "anonymously detect when carts are in proximity to in-store displays" to measure dwell time and engagement, deliberately not connected to loyalty data and collecting no personal identifiers (Grocery Dive, February 2026). Liz Roche, Albertsons Media Collective's VP of Media and Measurement, is refreshingly rigorous about what that proves: "Dwell time likely equates to an incremental sale, but we actually need to test those models."

That rigor is the point. The credible standard is incrementality, not correlation. The IAB's commerce-media guidelines set out four accepted incrementality methodologies, experiments, model-based counterfactuals, econometric models, and hybrid proxies, all built on "credible counterfactuals, control of bias, and separation of signal from noise" (IAB, November 2025). The Albertsons and Sargento result cited earlier, a $2.41 matched-market iROAS, comes from exactly this kind of test-versus-control design, which is why it carries weight with brands rather than reading as a house number.

Measurement is also the answer to the question of in-store online visibility: a well-run network measures both directions of the online-to-offline loop. In-store exposure can lift online search and basket-building, and online campaigns drive store visits, roughly 3 in 10 shoppers research online but buy in-store, on eMarketer's analysis (eMarketer, June 2025). A retailer that reports both directions gives brands a fuller picture than either channel alone, and makes its whole audience more visible and more valuable.

Now the part that pays off at scale, and the honest answer to the multi-retailer, unified-reporting questions CPG buyers ask. A brand allocating budget across several retailers wants to compare them on the same yardstick; a mid-size network that reports in its own private dialect is hard to buy. The way a retailer earns that cross-retailer budget is to adopt recognized standards so its numbers are comparable and auditable. A mid-2025 eMarketer analysis found that 55% of US advertisers cite lack of cross-platform standardization as their single biggest retail media challenge (eMarketer, June 2025), and the standards bodies have responded. IAB Europe's Commerce Media Measurement Standards V2 set a default 30-day lookback with customizable windows and standardized gross and net sales definitions, with a six-month grace period running to the end of July 2026 (ExchangeWire, January 2026), and its Retail Media Certification Programme lets a network demonstrate audited compliance to buyers (IAB Europe, January 2026). Jason Wescott, who chairs IAB Europe's Retail and Commerce Media Committee, framed the payoff: standardized measurement brings "greater clarity, consistency, and comparability... while still allowing the flexibility needed to reflect different business models." Adopting it, alongside the IAB's in-store metrics (loop duration, impression visibility, sales lift, brand lift, and new-customer identification), is how a network signals to a multi-retailer CPG buyer that its inventory can be bought with confidence.

One caution, to set expectations honestly: brands do not fully trust retail media measurement yet. On Improvado's 2026 analysis, 75% of advertisers cite incrementality as their biggest measurement challenge and only 15% report confidence in measurement effectiveness (Improvado, July 2026). And ROAS alone is not the finish line, as Max Knorr of Publicis Media put it: "ROAS is not the complete picture. It overlooks critical factors such as profit margins, incrementality, customer lifetime value" (IAB Europe). The networks that win the cross-retailer budget are the ones that report incrementality credibly, not just the biggest ROAS figure. For the full measurement methodology, our hub Closed-Loop Attribution in Retail Media: The 2026 Measurement Playbook is the deep dive.

How Osmos Fits a Retailer Building an In-Store Network

Osmos is a retail media operating system built around the three channels a retailer actually owns, onsite, offsite, and in-store, with in-store treated as a first-class channel rather than a bolt-on. On the digital in-store side, Osmos turns stores into monetization hubs: store-specific ad personalization (advertisers target and tailor promotions to specific store locations), granular control down to sections, aisles, and shelves, self-serve scheduling with custom ad-slot booking and screen selection, audience intelligence (demographic insight and in-store movement patterns), dynamic QR codes that attribute in-store engagement, and online-to-offline analytics that tie online activity to in-store sales.

Osmos runs the analog side on the same rails, which is the part most stacks leave out. Floor decals, shelf talkers, fridge decals, end caps, banners, and sampling booths are listed and managed as inventory from one dashboard, with daily, weekly, or monthly booking schedules and custom start dates, pricing a retailer can change at any point to follow demand, and unlimited tags that become the targeting parameters advertisers buy against. Media sales works from a booking calendar showing real-time fill rate and monetization potential pivoted by city, store, placement, and activity type. Advertisers book in three steps, select inventory, upload creative, schedule the activation, with a shared media library and retailer-approved creative templates, then a configurable multi-level review workflow with in-platform feedback and an ML-based content-quality check. Execution is tracked end to end: advertiser orders route automatically to the vendor with brand, due date, assets, and quantity, procurement and installation are tracked to completion, store staff upload proof-of-execution photos from a phone, and the retailer downloads a timestamped proof-of-delivery report to give the advertiser. Reporting runs at store, placement, and asset-type level, integrating footfall hardware where a retailer has it and using reach estimates where it does not, with lead capture from sampling booths flowing back into the same analytics.

The shopper-data layer described earlier runs underneath all three channels, first-party targeting without sharing PII, geo and store targeting to state, city, ZIP, and individual-store level, and customizable attribution windows, so every surface is priced inventory rather than undifferentiated space. The two build paths match how far along a retailer already is: the Turnkey Solution stands up the whole white-labelled stack in about four weeks, while the Custom Solution adds in-store, offsite, or demand capability to an existing stack at the scale of about 25 billion auctions a month.

Foot Traffic, Trends, and the 2026 Outlook

In-store retail media is, first, a way to monetize the traffic you already have, and grocery shows why that is such a large prize: more than 91% of food and beverage sales still happen in physical stores, even though the category is 17.5% of all retail sales, on eMarketer's June 2026 numbers (eMarketer, June 2026). A grocer with heavy weekly footfall is sitting on one of the densest monetizable audiences in all of retail, which is why the grocery in-store opportunity is where a network's return on investment tends to be highest, and why our grocery retail media offering is built around omnichannel serving that reads live store inventory and shopper behavior. The best in-store platforms for a grocery merchant are the ones that monetize that dense footfall well and measure it credibly, not the ones with the flashiest screens.

On foot traffic specifically, the honest framing is that in-store retail media primarily monetizes and improves existing visits rather than acting as a standalone acquisition channel, though it supports footfall in two real ways. First, relevant, inventory-aware placements make the visit better rather than worse, which protects the traffic you have; screens and audio that surface genuinely useful, in-stock promotions read as experience, not clutter. Second, the online-to-offline loop works in both directions, so a network that extends campaigns offsite and measures store visits turns online discovery into physical trips. The platforms that best "drive foot traffic," then, are the omnichannel ones that connect a shopper's online discovery to an in-store purchase, not single-format in-store tools in isolation.

The trends shaping 2026 are visible in the buildouts already named: audio scaling to whole fleets (Dollar General toward 20,000 stores), screens multiplying across entrances, aisles, and checkouts (CVS toward 11,000, Kroger with Barrows, Hy-Vee's 10,000-plus, and Grocery TV now operating in 6,500 stores across 120-plus retailers) (Modern Retail, January 2026), cart-level measurement moving from pilot to fleet (Albertsons from 80 to about 800 stores), and measurement standardization advancing through the IAB and IAB Europe. The direction of travel for the future of retail media monetization is clear: in-store stops being a signage side business and becomes a measured, first-class channel of an omnichannel network, and the 3.3% share of ad dollars starts to catch up with the 80%-plus share of sales it represents.

The challenges are the flip side of that opportunity, and worth naming plainly. Measurement is the hardest: no click, no cookie, and a genuine need to prove incrementality without over-claiming, which is why Albertsons is testing its models rather than asserting them. Format fit constrains choices, because not every store has wall space, as Dollar General's audio-first path shows. And buyers demand breadth and rigor: 70% of retail media decision-makers want multiple ad-format support and 74% prioritize strong data and security compliance, on eMarketer's analysis (eMarketer, June 2025), which means a single-format in-store side business struggles to compete against omnichannel networks for the same budget. None of these are reasons not to build; they are the reasons to build in-store as one channel of a real network, with measurement and shopper data underneath it, rather than as a standalone screen program.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is retail media for a retailer?

For a retailer, retail media is the advertising business it builds on its own stores, sites, apps, and shopper data, offering brands paid, targeted, measurable placements against the retailer's own audiences. It is an owned, high-margin revenue line funded largely by the endemic brands the retailer already stocks, not media the retailer buys. The IAB's formal framing for the physical side is "advertising inventory that leverages retail data for planning, execution, and measurement within a store's physical environment" (MarTech, December 2024).

What is the difference between retail media and traditional digital advertising for retailers?

Traditional digital advertising rents a third-party audience assembled from cookies and inference and settles for modeled conversions. Retail media runs on the retailer's own authenticated shoppers, targets with real purchase history, and can tie the outcome to an actual transaction, better data, a shopper in a buying context, and provable results, all owned rather than rented. That is why retail media revenue carries far higher margins than the underlying retail business and strengthens rather than erodes as third-party cookies decay.

Is CPM the right way to price in-store retail media?

Usually not. Charging per thousand impressions means committing to count impressions, which requires sensor or camera coverage across the fleet, and most retailers have not installed it. Without that hardware a CPM is an estimate presented as a measurement, and advertisers price that risk in. The units that hold up are cost per store, cost per day, and cost per campaign, tied to store count and duration, with high-visibility and finite placements booked at a flat rate for a defined window. Retailers with instrumented screens can price some inventory on a CPM; for everyone else, reach figures belong in planning rather than on the invoice.

How do you target in-store retail media ads?

By store, by day, and by hour, not by individual shopper. A screen does not identify the person walking past and change its creative for them; that is possible in principle and is not how in-store networks run in practice. Loyalty and point-of-sale data instead tell the retailer when and where a category converts, and the placement is scheduled to match: dairy in the morning, soft drinks on weekend afternoons, seasonal baskets in the stores and weeks they actually form. Placements are also tagged with attributes an advertiser can buy against, such as high visibility, store format, or region. Shopper-level targeting is real, but it belongs to the retailer's onsite and offsite channels.

What is analog in-store retail media, and can it be run as real ad inventory?

Analog in-store retail media is the non-digital placement layer: floor decals, shelf talkers, fridge decals, end caps, banners, and product sampling booths. It is the largest in-store inventory category in most chains and the most commonly left out of the media business, usually handled as trade marketing rather than monetized as media. It can absolutely be run as real inventory, and doing so is an operations problem rather than a hardware one: list every placement in one system with a booking calendar and fill-rate view, price per store and per duration, tag placements as targeting parameters, give advertisers a select-upload-schedule booking flow with approved creative templates and a review workflow, route orders to vendors automatically, track installation, and capture photographic proof of execution with a timestamped proof-of-delivery report. Reporting then runs at store, placement, and asset-type level. That proof layer is what moves analog from a category-manager favour to a renewable media line.

What retail media network software do retailers use, and how do the options compare?

There are several categories, not one: full-stack operating systems that run onsite, offsite, and in-store as one system (where Osmos sits); demand-side and supply-side platforms such as Criteo Commerce Grid and PubMatic Convert, whose published offerings focus on digital surfaces; onsite and identity-led measurement platforms such as Epsilon Retail Media; and native and programmatic supply platforms such as Equativ. The right pick depends on whether a retailer wants to own the whole business or connect one primitive; our platform-picks spoke compares them by scenario.

How does retail media differ for marketplaces versus traditional retailers?

Marketplaces are not traditional retailers, and the difference shapes the media business. A marketplace lists inventory it does not own and treats advertising as one of several monetization levers alongside commission, listing fees, and subscription; Marketplacer, for instance, lists retail media as one of five monetization models and places it under "Add-on Services." A traditional retailer with stores owns the shopper relationship, the physical footfall, and the first-party purchase data outright, so in-store traffic and shopper data are the core, dedicated foundation of its media business rather than a bolt-on. The upshot: a traditional retailer's most valuable and most defensible retail media asset is precisely the physical and first-party inventory a marketplace does not have.

How does retail media improve a store's online visibility (and the other way around)?

Through the online-to-offline loop, measured in both directions. A network that runs in-store alongside onsite and offsite can show how in-store exposure lifts online search and basket-building, and how online campaigns drive store visits, useful because roughly 3 in 10 shoppers research online but buy in-store (eMarketer, June 2025). Reporting both directions gives brands a fuller view than either channel alone and makes the retailer's whole audience more visible and more valuable.

Can native advertising drive in-store traffic, and what happened to Sharethrough?

Native advertising, ad formats that match the look of their surroundings, is mainly an offsite and onsite digital lever; native display spending in the US is expected to reach $147.98 billion in 2026, up 13.1% (eMarketer, January 2026). It contributes to in-store goals indirectly, by extending a retailer's first-party audiences into offsite channels that drive store visits and measuring the online-to-offline result, rather than as an in-store format itself. On Sharethrough specifically: it unified into Equativ in June 2025, so any current evaluation of its native and retail media capability should be of Equativ (whose Kamino Retail acquisition expanded its retail media division). For native performance benchmarks, see Native Advertising in Retail Media.

Is MadHive a retail media platform retailers can use?

Not as such. MadHive is a Connected TV advertising platform built for local media professionals, broadcasters such as Fox and Scripps, plus small businesses via its Frequence partnership, and it has no retailer-facing or in-store retail media product. Its strength is high-scale local and CTV bidding infrastructure, so a retailer who finds MadHive while researching retail media is most likely looking for CTV demand to extend campaigns offsite, which is one input to a network rather than the network itself. To build and run in-store and onsite inventory, a retailer needs a retail media platform rather than a CTV bidder.

What is Epsilon Retail Media, and is it the same as CitrusAd?

Epsilon Retail Media is Publicis Groupe and Epsilon's retail media offering; its onsite engine was formerly branded CitrusAd, so they are the same lineage under current naming. It spans onsite sponsored product ads, display, and brand pages; offsite display, video, CTV, and audio; and in-store attribution that reconciles online ad activity with in-store point-of-sale transactions. Its distinct strength is identity-led measurement. Worth noting that its in-store capability, per its own page, is attribution rather than in-store ad-serving inventory, so a retailer that wants to offer in-store screen or audio placements needs a serving layer alongside it.

Sources

1. eMarketer, "FAQ on in-store retail media: Closing the gap between demand and execution," June 2026
2. MarTech, "IAB finalizes retail media networks standards for in-store," December 2024
3. MediaPost, "Albertsons Aims To Show What In-Store Ads Actually Deliver," January 2026
4. Grocery Dive, "The Friday Checkout: Albertsons turns to cart trackers to prove in-store retail media," February 2026
5. Modern Retail, "Dollar General prioritizes in-store audio over digital screens," April 2026
6. Modern Retail, "Retailers like Kroger, CVS plan many more screens for in-store ads in 2026," January 2026
7. Mars United Commerce, "Retail Media Roundup: June 2026," June 2026
8. eMarketer, "First-party data limitations in retail media will become unavoidable in 2026," February 2026
9. Improvado, "Top 15 Retail Media Networks 2026: Rankings & Benchmarks," July 2026
10. IAB, "Guidelines for Incremental Measurement in Commerce Media," November 2025
11. ExchangeWire, "IAB Europe Releases Commerce Media Measurement Standards V2 & Flexi Ad Sizes Guidelines," January 2026
12. IAB Europe, "IAB Europe Releases Updated Commerce (Incl. Retail) Media Standards & Flexi Ad Sizes Guidelines for Retail Media Networks," January 2026
13. eMarketer, "5 challenges commerce media networks face when scaling," June 2025
14. IAB Europe, "Measuring What Matters: Navigating the Role of Retail Media Metrics from ROAS to Incrementality"
15. eMarketer, "Native Ad Spending" learning-center guide, January 2026
16. Decentriq, "CDP alternatives for data collaboration & activation (2026)," March 2026
17. Amazon Ads (advertising business homepage and products page). https://advertising.amazon.com/
18. Criteo, "Commerce Grid: the world's first commerce SSP." https://www.criteo.com/platform/commerce-grid/
19. Criteo, "Retail Media" (retailer-facing solutions page). https://www.criteo.com/solutions/retail-media/
20. PubMatic, "Commerce Media Solutions" (Convert). https://pubmatic.com/solutions/commerce-media/
21. MadHive, "About us." https://www.madhive.com/about-us
22. Epsilon, "CitrusAd is now part of the Epsilon retail media offering" (Epsilon Retail Media, EMEA). https://www.epsilon.com/emea/products-and-services/epsilon-retail-media-citrusad
23. Equativ, "Equativ and Sharethrough Will Now Operate Under Equativ Brand," June 2025. https://www.equativ.com/press/equativ-and-sharethrough-will-now-operate-under-equativ-brand-solidifying-global-position-as-leading-end-to-end-media-platform
24. Marketplacer, "Marketplace Platform Software." https://marketplacer.com/marketplace-platform-software/

Note on sourcing: neutral analyst, trade, and standards-body sources (entries 1 to 16) are cited inline and hyperlinked above. Entries 17 to 24 sit on platform or vendor domains and are referenced only for each platform's own first-party facts (its product description, positioning, or naming); they are left unlinked by design so the article does not route authority to a vendor for an industry claim. The eightx.co figure that also reports the 3.3% in-store share is sponsored content (Fluent, Inc.) and is not used here; the neutral eMarketer figure is cited in its place.