How retailers earn ad revenue in-store while delivering ROI to grocery brands

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

A grocery retailer earns in-store ad revenue by packaging the store estate as ad inventory priced per store, per campaign and per day, and keeps that revenue by handing the grocery brands funding those campaigns evidence tied to sales in the stores where the campaign actually ran. Return on investment (ROI) in-store is demonstrated through store-level sales lift measured against matched control stores, not through a cost per thousand impressions (CPM), because almost no retailer has the sensor coverage across its fleet that a real impression count would require. On Osmos, every campaign reports back against point-of-sale (POS) data for the stores that ran it, which is what makes the evidence conversation with a brand possible in the first place.

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The broader question of how retail media works differently in each vertical, from grocery to pharmacy to home improvement, is covered in the parent guide to retail media by sector. The build-side questions, which zones a store can monetize, what the inventory actually is, how the economics work and how a campaign gets booked, are documented in full in how retailers monetize in-store traffic; a reader who needs the how-to should start there. This page takes the harder half of the same job: the proof. Ad revenue from a store estate is easy to earn once and hard to keep, and what decides whether a grocery brand comes back with a bigger number next quarter is the quality of the evidence the retailer can put in front of it.

The two-sided problem: yield for the retailer, evidence for the grocery brand

A retail media network (RMN) built on physical stores answers to two masters whose definitions of success do not naturally line up. The retailer wants yield: more of the estate monetized, more weeks of the year booked, higher rates on the placements shoppers actually walk past. The grocery brand wants causal evidence: proof that the money it moved into your stores produced sales it would not otherwise have made, in a form its own finance team will accept.

Collin Colburn, VP of Commerce and Retail Media at the IAB, described what happens when those two definitions collide inside one campaign: "When a brand's media team demands one-to-one attribution to satisfy their Media Mix Scorecard, but the retail merchant cares about moving pallets to satisfy their Retail Sales Scorecard, gridlock occurs" (ppc.land, April 2026). Gridlock is expensive for the retailer, not the brand. A brand with an unresolved measurement argument simply moves the next flight of budget to a channel where the argument is already settled.

Paul Brenner, SVP of Global Retail Media and Partnerships at ISM, put the resolution more bluntly in the same report: "We've overcomplicated the problem by forcing digital thinking onto a channel that operates very differently." His follow-on point is the one a grocery retail media team should build its reporting around: brands judge the channel by whether the product moves at the shelf in the stores that ran the campaign, and that is a test a retailer with clean POS data can pass without owning a single camera.

The stakes are worth being precise about. Retail media spending is projected to exceed $300 billion globally by 2030, roughly 20% of total global advertising revenue, on Omdia research reported by ppc.land. In-store's slice of that is still small and still early: eMarketer, forecasting in 2024, put US in-store retail media ad spend at $1.06 billion by 2028, around 0.8% of all retail media spend at the time of that forecast (eMarketer, 2024). The gap between where shoppers buy and where retail media money currently sits is the opening. Closing it depends on whether in-store campaigns can be evidenced as reliably as onsite ones, which is a measurement problem before it is a demand problem.

What an in-store CPM actually counts, and why per-store pricing protects the return conversation

Some vendors do publish in-store screen rates in CPM terms. Improvado's roundup of retail media networks describes in-store digital screens, kiosks and point-of-purchase displays as typically priced on a CPM basis in the $10 to $30 range (Improvado). That number is real in the sense that it gets quoted. What matters for a retailer trying to defend a rate card is what sits underneath it.

The IAB and IAB Europe answered that question jointly in In-Store Retail Media: Definitions and Measurement Standards, finalized 3 December 2024 and still the current version. The standard sets out a four-rung ladder of what an in-store "impression" can mean, and the rungs are not interchangeable.

Ad play is "number of times an ad is displayed or rendered on a particular format." It is a device log event. It proves the screen played the file. It makes no claim that a human was present.

Gross impression is "the number of individuals over a period of time, where presence in the defined Display Exposure Zone exists while the Display is functional." It counts presence in a zone, not viewing.

Opportunity to see (OTS) is a "[s]ingle opportunity to view an advert. This is the number of people who could pass by an in-store activation."

Likelihood to see (LTS) is "[a] further refinement of Viewable Impressions whereby an adjustment is applied to account for the likelihood individuals noticed or saw the content."

The standard is explicit about where the industry actually stands on that ladder: "Today RMNs should report on ad play and gross impressions" (IAB and IAB Europe, December 2024). OTS is framed as the future best proxy for a viewable impression in the in-store environment. LTS sits further out again, because the adjustment it requires depends on sensing that most estates do not have.

Read those two facts together and the pricing question answers itself. An in-store CPM quoted today is, in almost every case, priced against a play log or a zone-presence estimate. It is not priced against a verified view, because the standards body that defines the term says the industry is not reporting at that rung yet. A retailer that builds a rate card on impressions is therefore promising a unit it cannot audit, and the first advertiser who reads the standard will notice.

The unit a grocery retailer can defend is the one tied to things it can count exactly: how many stores, and for how long. In-store campaigns at Osmos are priced per store, per campaign and per day, with premium placements carrying premium rates. Nothing in that model requires a sensor. Everything in it is verifiable by both sides on the insertion order, which is precisely what makes the return conversation afterwards a conversation about sales rather than a conversation about whether the impression number is honest.

This is also why cost per click (CPC) and the dynamic ad positioning that goes with it do not transfer to the store. There is no click event on a shelf. CPC bidding and real-time slot promotion belong to onsite search and browse placements, where an auction can move a product up a results page between one query and the next; those product ads assemble automatically from the retailer's catalogue, with no creative for the advertiser to upload. In-store the equivalent levers are chosen at planning time: which stores, which days, which day parts, which position in the screen loop, which formats. For how return on ad spend (ROAS) behaves by format on those onsite surfaces, our ROAS benchmarks by platform and ad format carries the ranges, and retail media network monetization covers the revenue models a network can run.

What in-store retail media can prove today, and what no retailer can honestly claim yet

In-store retail media is advertising inventory inside the physical store, digital screens, in-store audio, smart-cart displays and analog placements, funded by brands and planned, delivered and measured by the retailer that owns the estate.

What it can prove, reliably, is sales movement. The retailer owns the POS record for every store, so it can report the difference between stores that ran a campaign and stores that did not over the same window. That comparison is stronger than any impression count, because it measures the thing the brand actually buys.

Matched-market measurement is a design that pairs campaign stores with statistically similar control stores, so the sales difference between them can be attributed to the campaign rather than to seasonality, weather, price changes or store mix. Albertsons Media Collective built exactly this for in-store campaigns, matching stores on nearly 60 variables before comparison (Albertsons Companies, January 2026). A control store chosen badly produces a lift number a brand's analytics team will take apart in a week.

Osmos names the two halves of that read separately, because they answer different questions. Footfall Analytics is the delivery-side layer, and Osmos has it in early access today: sensor partners pair each ad play with a presence signal within plus or minus five seconds to produce IAB-aligned verified impressions, with a footfall-based opportunity to see used as the bridge in stores where sensors are not yet installed. Osmos splits it in two, and the split is the honest part: audience and impression measurement plus store-level POS ingestion are in early access now, and sales attribution follows in a second phase (Osmos, footfall analytics). On the outcome side Osmos is explicit about where the category currently stands. Asked directly whether in-store measurement shows sales impact rather than impressions, its own answer is that today it is verified impressions plus store-level POS data, and that exposed-versus-control sales-lift attribution, the product it calls Store Lift, is coming soon (Osmos, in-store platform). Read that as the state of the category rather than of one platform: the control-store comparison is a design the retailer runs on its own POS record today, which is what this page has been describing throughout. Footfall analytics evidences and prices the inventory. Store lift evidences the outcome. A retailer that presents the first as though it were the second is back inside the impression argument the standard says the category has not earned yet.

What in-store cannot honestly claim, today, comes down to four things. It cannot report person-level exposure, because it does not know who walked past the screen. It cannot produce deterministic view-through, because there is no device carrying an identifier through the exposure. It cannot report viewable impressions at the OTS or LTS rungs of the IAB ladder. And store sales data arrives with lag, so a weekly cadence is realistic for lift reporting where onsite reporting runs near real time.

None of those limits blocks a renewal. Over-claiming does. Skai's 2026 survey of 166 retail media advertisers found incrementality measurement to be their top measurement challenge, with only 20% describing themselves as proficient at both measuring incrementality and applying what it tells them, and half operating at only a basic level (Skai, February 2026). The constraint sits in method and analytical capacity rather than in supply of numbers, which means a retailer that ships a clean, well-designed lift read is solving a problem most of its advertisers have not solved for themselves.

The methodology underneath all of this, control design, incrementality, lookback windows and the difference between correlation and causation, is documented in our retail media attribution and measurement guide. This page is about what a grocery brand needs to see; that one is about how to produce it.

Two measurement layers rarely make it into an in-store conversation and both belong in this one. Online-to-offline analytics reads a store purchase against the digital activity that preceded it, so an app open, a clipped coupon or an offsite impression can be tied to a basket bought in the aisle rather than sitting in a separate ledger. A/B testing of ads applies the same control logic one level down: two creative treatments run across matched store cells on the same flight, read on the sales difference between them, which tells a brand which execution earned the lift rather than only that a lift happened. Neither replaces the store-level lift read. Both answer the question a brand asks once it accepts the lift number, which is what to change on the next flight.

Targeting that survives a renewal review: store, day and hour

In-store advertising is aimed by place and time. Which stores, which days, which hours, which formats. It is not aimed at people, and the creative does not change based on who walked in. Footfall analytics is the layer that makes those four choices evidence-backed rather than assumed: it targets by store, city, zone or aisle, so a placement is bookable in the context it actually sits in and priced for that context (Osmos, footfall analytics). It is a place-and-time instrument. It tells a retailer which aisle in which store carries the traffic worth selling, not who walked down it. A grocery retailer that describes its in-store targeting in person-level language during a pitch will be asked, in the renewal review, to evidence something it cannot evidence.

The market's own product documentation reflects this. Vibenomics, a Mood Media company running in-store audio, describes targeting by designated market area, day part, store list and stock keeping unit (SKU). Walmart Connect documents its own in-store inventory the same way, by where the screen sits in the store, from Deli and Bakery through the TV wall to self-checkout.

The first-party data layer is what makes place and time precise rather than arbitrary. Loyalty and basket data tell a retailer which stores over-index for a category, which weeks a category peaks, and which hours a store's category volume concentrates in. That produces plans a brand can follow: a seasonal grilling campaign that runs in the several hundred stores whose markets over-index on the category, Thursday through Sunday only, across the six weeks the category actually moves. The data decides the store list and the calendar. It never decides the individual. Our first-party data targeting guide covers how that data layer is built and governed.

In-store analog inventory is the non-digital placements in a store: shelf talkers, wobblers, danglers, floor graphics, cart panels, entrance and end-cap signage. It belongs in the estate and in the rate card, and it reaches every store in the chain from day one, because it needs no hardware, no network and no installation cycle. Analog also clarifies the measurement argument in a useful way: an analog placement generates no play log and no impression estimate whatsoever, so the only honest proof of its value is the same control-store lift read that produces the most defensible number on screens. Running both formats on one measurement design, one insertion order and one report is what lets a retailer put a whole store in front of a brand rather than a screen network. For the format depth on the digital side, our guide to in-store retail media and digital screens covers screen placement, loop construction and creative practice.

There is a second-order benefit brands ask about. A screen or an audio spot that persuades a shopper to open the app, clip a coupon or join the loyalty scheme returns another identified shopper and another purchase record to the retailer, which sharpens the store, day and hour decisions on the next campaign. It is a compounding argument for the retailer, not a lift claim to put in a brand's report.

The evidence package a grocery brand needs before it renews

A grocery brand's renewal decision is made by people who have to defend the spend internally. Give them a package they can forward without editing. A retailer should be able to produce every component of it for every in-store campaign:

1. A pre-agreed baseline. The category and SKU sales trend in the campaign stores for the equivalent prior period, fixed before the campaign starts, not reconstructed afterwards.
2. A named control group. The specific control stores, and the variables they were matched on.
3. Store-level sales lift. The difference between campaign stores and control stores across the flight, reported at SKU and category level, with the store list attached.
4. An incrementality claim the retailer can defend under questioning. State the design, the window, and what the number does and does not account for. A defensible single-digit lift beats an indefensible double-digit one every time, because the second one invites an audit the retailer will lose.
5. Delivery evidence for what ran. Play logs for screens, spot logs for audio, and photographic proof of placement for analog, tied to store and date. This is the compliance layer, not the outcome layer, and brands notice when it is missing.
6. Basket and repeat effects where the data supports them. Basket size on campaign-store transactions containing the SKU, and repeat purchase in the following period, both of which matter more to a brand's category team than the headline lift.
7. A stated reporting cadence and service level agreement (SLA). When the read lands, in what format, and who fields questions on it. Brands plan their next flight against your calendar.
8. Data delivery into the brand's own stack. A file or feed the brand's analytics team can load, not only a dashboard login.

Two published results show what the top of that package looks like in practice. Walmart Connect reports proof-of-concept testing on its in-store screens producing up to 5% sales lift for food suppliers on Deli and Bakery screens, across an estate of more than 4,600 US stores. And Marketing Dive reported that the integration of in-store screens produced a 14% in-store sales lift for a Mondelez campaign for Sargento Cheese Bakes, measured through the Albertsons matched-market framework (Marketing Dive, January 2026). The brand's own verdict on that measurement is the part a retailer should study: "Albertsons Media Collective's matched market measurement gave us clear, causal insight into how in-store media drove incremental sales," said Melissa Pitmon, Customer Director, OmniChannel at Mondelez (Albertsons Companies, January 2026). Kroger Precision Marketing, powered by 84.51, states that its retail media "makes advertising more effective by connecting media exposure directly to store sales," which is the sentence every grocery retail media team should be able to say truthfully about its own network.

Item 8 deserves its own attention, because it is where mid-size networks lose multi-retailer consumer packaged goods (CPG) budgets to larger ones. A brand buying across five grocery retailers needs your numbers inside its own model, not in a fifth login. Walmart's Scintilla Media Data Feed gives approved agency and technology partners structured access to approximately 500 Walmart operational and retail data elements, governed through partner certification, with the advertiser deciding which partners see which elements (ppc.land, April 2026). Linda Lomelino, VP of Product at Walmart Data Ventures and Ads, framed what that solves: until now "media teams and tech partners have been working with an incomplete picture" (same source). Improvado notes that Costco restricts application programming interface (API) access to select partners and delivers most reporting through managed dashboards. Both are legitimate commercial choices, but a brand comparing networks on how fast it can fold results into its own measurement will feel the difference, and a retailer that offers a real feed removes a reason to spend elsewhere.

One caution about which numbers belong in an in-store package. Instacart's frequently cited Schnucks result, a 2.6% click-through rate, 5.7x average ROAS and a 7x increase in retail media revenue, is an onsite result, measured on Schnucks.com and the Schnucks mobile app after adopting Carrot Ads (Supermarket Perimeter, October 2025). It is a strong onsite proof point and it is not evidence about screens or aisles. Mixing the two in one deck is the fastest way to lose a sophisticated brand's trust in everything else in the package.

Evaluating an in-store platform on whether it can prove return

The criteria that matter to a grocery retailer whose goal is provable in-store return are narrower than a general platform checklist. Five questions decide it:

• Measurement design. Does the platform support matched or control-store comparison against your own POS data, or does it report activity only?
• POS and loyalty integration. Can campaign results be joined to transaction data at store and SKU level, on your infrastructure and your governance?
• Store and day-part planning. Can a campaign be scoped to a store list, a set of days and a set of hours, and can the plan be evidenced to the advertiser?
• Format and analog coverage. Does the estate model include screens, audio and analog placements on one rate card and one report, or only the screens?
• Commercial model. Does the pricing model match what the retailer can actually count, per store, per campaign, per day, or does it require impression claims the estate cannot audit?

Against those criteria, here is how the named in-store options in the grocery market line up. This table is Osmos's own read of the category, and each entry reflects what the platform itself currently documents.

Frequently asked questions

What is a retail media platform, and which named platforms apply in-store?

A retail media platform is the software a retailer uses to package its own inventory as advertising, take demand from brands, deliver campaigns and report results back against its own sales data. In-store it has to do three things the online case does not: plan by store, day and hour rather than by audience segment, price on store count and duration rather than on impressions, and carry analog placements alongside screens and audio. The sections above cover each.

Two frequently named platforms are not in-store grocery options, for different reasons. Amazon Ads is the reference point for onsite scale and for what brands have been trained to expect from reporting, so it shapes the standard a grocery retailer is measured against; it is not a model for monetizing a grocery store estate, because the inventory, the pricing units and the proof mechanism are different in a physical store. Kevel supplies ad-serving infrastructure that companies use to build their own ad products, so it is a build-your-own component rather than a grocery in-store network, and it belongs in a build-versus-buy conversation about the wider technology stack rather than in a shortlist of in-store options.

How do retail media platforms work end to end?

Three layers do the work. Campaign APIs handle booking, campaign creation and management. Event APIs carry delivery signals, impressions and clicks online, play and spot logs in-store. Reporting APIs push results back to advertisers and into their own analytics environments. Online, an auction sits between the first and second layers and decides placement in real time. In-store, that decision is made at planning time instead.

What in-store retail media ad formats can a grocery retailer offer?

Digital screens at entrances, aisle ends, category zones, checkout and self-checkout; in-store audio; smart-cart screens where a retailer runs them; and the analog placements named in the targeting section above, from shelf talkers to end-cap signage. Screens and audio produce a play log. Analog produces none, which is why store-level sales lift is the measurement design that covers the whole estate consistently.

What changed in in-store retail media platforms since 2024?

Three things that matter to a retailer's evidence package. The joint standard above gave the category shared definitions to argue from. Retailer measurement moved from pilot to launched product, with Albertsons Media Collective launching matched-market incrementality for in-store campaigns in January 2026. And Walmart's Scintilla Media Data Feed opened structured access to around 500 retail data elements to approved partners in 2026.

Which analytics platforms measure in-store retail media?

The core measurement asset is the retailer's own POS and loyalty data, joined to a campaign store list and a matched control group. Third-party measurement providers can validate or extend that design, but they cannot replace it, because the sales record only exists on the retailer's side. Our attribution and measurement guide covers how to build the read.

Which retail media platform is best for a marketplace?

Marketplace monetization is a different problem from a store estate: the inventory is search and browse placements across third-party catalogues, and the return question is about auction dynamics and take rate rather than store-level lift. Our guide to what ROI really means in retail media for marketplaces covers that case.

Sources

1. IAB and IAB Europe, In-Store Retail Media: Definitions and Measurement Standards (3 December 2024). https://www.iab.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/IAB-Europe_IAB-In-Store-Retail-Media-Standards_FINAL-DECEMBER-2024.pdf
2. IAB, In-Store Retail Media guidelines landing page (3 December 2024). https://www.iab.com/guidelines/in-store-retail-media/
3. ppc.land, In-store media's measurement problem is not what you think (7 April 2026). https://ppc.land/in-store-medias-measurement-problem-is-not-what-you-think/
4. ppc.land, Walmart's Scintilla API opens retail data to media partners (28 April 2026). https://ppc.land/walmarts-scintilla-api-opens-retail-data-to-media-partners/
5. Skai, The 2026 State of Retail Media Measurement and Incrementality (4 February 2026). https://skai.io/blog/the-2026-state-of-retail-media-measurement-and-incrementality/
6. Albertsons Companies, Albertsons Media Collective Launches Incrementality Measurement to Prove True Media Impact of In-Store Campaigns and Plans Expansion (6 January 2026). https://www.albertsonscompanies.com/newsroom/press-releases/news-details/2026/Albertsons-Media-Collective-Launches-Incrementality-Measurement-to-Prove-True-Media-Impact-of-In-Store-Campaigns-and-Plans-Expansion/default.aspx
7. Marketing Dive, Mondelez lifts sales as Albertsons tackles in-store retail media measurement (6 January 2026). https://www.marketingdive.com/news/mondelez-lifts-sales-albertsons-tackles-in-store-retail-media-measurement/808842/
8. Supermarket Perimeter, Grocery retailers using Instacart's Carrot Ads see strong results (27 October 2025). https://www.supermarketperimeter.com/articles/13345-grocery-retailers-using-instacarts-carrot-ads-see-strong-results
9. eMarketer, In-store retail media ad spend will hit $1.06 billion by 2028 (6 June 2024). https://www.emarketer.com/content/in-store-retail-media-spend-hits-1-billion-by-2028
10. Improvado, Top 15 Retail Media Networks: rankings and benchmarks. https://improvado.io/blog/top-retail-media-networks
11. Walmart Connect, Store Ads: digital screens. https://www.walmartconnect.com/solutions/in-store/digital-screens
12. Grocery TV, In-store retail media platform for retailers. https://grocerytv.com/retailers/
13. Kroger Precision Marketing powered by 84.51, Solutions. https://www.8451.com/solutions/kroger-precision-marketing/
14. Instacart, Carrot Ads. https://company.instacart.com/enterprise-platform/retail-media/carrot-ads/ic-sourced-demand
15. Vibenomics, a Mood Media company, Audio In-Store. https://vibenomics.com/solutions/audio-in-store/
16. Advertima, In-store retail media solutions. https://advertima.com/
17. Osmos, In-store platform: footfall analytics. https://www.osmos.ai/platform/in-store/footfall-analytics