By Ollie Shayer, Senior Director, Global Strategy and Innovation at SMG
Retail media has spent years proving its value. The next challenge is different: proving that value is easy to access.
The signs of strain are already there. IAB Europe’s Attitudes to Retail Media research found that the proportion of brands working across four to six retail media networks more than doubled year-on-year, from 10% to 24%. Lack of standardisation and network fragmentation were also identified as the two biggest barriers to growth, cited by 53% and 51% of respondents respectively.
That is both a demand signal and a warning: advertisers want to work with more retail media networks, but every additional network can mean another proposition to understand, another planning process, another set of formats, another approval route and another reporting methodology to reconcile.
Individually, those differences are manageable. At scale, they create a friction tax on growth.
Which leaves retail media with an uncomfortable question: are we actually easy to work with?
The next wave of growth will be harder-won
Retailers unlocked the first wave of growth by building retail media propositions and deepening advertiser relationships. The next wave requires retail media to compete for broader media investment, including budgets controlled or heavily influenced by agencies.
IAB UK’s Futurescape work points in the same direction: retail media spend will increasingly come from primary media budgets, and retail media networks will need to operate like media owners by speaking the language of planners and traders.
Those budgets arrive with different expectations. Agencies need to understand where a network fits within a wider plan, compare opportunities, activate efficiently, and demonstrate performance back to clients.
IAB Europe’s Retailer Leaders Council has warned that without common standards, buyers can default to platforms that consolidate activity or concentrate spend with the networks perceived as safest and most familiar, not necessarily those producing the best outcome.
That should concern the whole market. If accessing retail media reach means repeatedly rebuilding the buying process, operational complexity starts choosing the winners.
The benchmark is no longer retail media
Some complexity was inevitable while retailers were building new media businesses. They had to develop propositions, prove the value of first-party data, and learn to operate not just as retailers, but as media owners.
That phase is over. Retail media networks are not only competing with each other; they are competing with search, social, video and programmatic: channels agencies already understand, supported by familiar infrastructure and established ways of working.
Retail Media Age’s advisory board recently framed the issue plainly: does retail media have a buying efficiency problem, and can agencies buy and scale it as efficiently as other channels?
That is the benchmark: not whether retail media is easier to buy than it was three years ago, but whether it is as easy to plan, activate and measure as the alternatives competing for the same budget.
First-party audiences, commerce signals and closed-loop measurement remain powerful differentiators. But value alone does not win investment. The experience of accessing that value is now part of the media proposition.
What friction costs
Friction does not sit at one point in the campaign; it runs through the whole workflow.
Before a brief is written, advertisers and agencies need to understand different retailer propositions, audiences, inventory and capabilities. Then come separate conversations, briefs and media plans. Activation introduces different specifications, timelines and approvals. Finance adds contracting and payment arrangements. And so on, and so forth.
When the campaign ends, buyers will also need to reconcile different reporting interfaces, attribution approaches, and measurement methodologies.
A cross-retailer campaign, activated across several retailers at the same time can, quickly become an operational exercise that involves multiple systems and stakeholders just to move one media plan from brief to measurement. Fragmentation is ultimately paid for in people’s time. For retailers, that means advertising revenue left on the table.
Agency teams are already under pressure on margins, staffing and capacity. If retail media requires substantially more resources to plan, activate and report than other channels, the issue is no longer operational. It is commercial.
Why retail media networks need to standardise the plumbing, not the proposition
Part of the answer is standardisation. There are areas where the industry clearly needs more of it. IAB Europe’s updated Commerce Media Measurement Standards and flexible ad-size guidance are designed to improve consistency, comparability and scalable activation across retail and commerce media.
But standardisation shouldn’t make every network identical: a retailer’s customer relationships, first-party data, physical and digital environments, category expertise and understanding of shopper behaviour are what make its proposition valuable.
Advertisers should choose between those differences. They should not be choosing based on which network creates the least administrative work.
We should standardise the plumbing, not the proposition.
Technology should connect the workflow behind the scenes: if it simply adds another platform or dashboard, it has failed.
Its role is to automate repetitive processes and move information more easily between planning, activation, optimisation and reporting.
Saving time is only the starting point. The bigger opportunity is to help planners do better work: less time stitching together spreadsheets, systems and processes; more time thinking about audiences, investment choices, creative strategy and performance.
That does not remove specialist expertise from retail media. It makes better use of it.
What retailers can change
The good news is that retailers don’t need to wait for the entire market to align before reducing friction in their own proposition.
Make the proposition easier to compare. Design around the agency workflow, not the retailer’s internal structure. Simplify specifications and approval routes. Build measurement that can be reconciled across networks. Use technology as an orchestration layer, not another destination.
None of that removes differentiation; it removes avoidable work.
Retail media’s complexity was easier to tolerate when the opportunity was new, but as the market matures, that tolerance will shrink.
Every unnecessary process gives agencies another reason to concentrate investment in the places that are simplest to navigate.
Ease is no longer an operational nice-to-have. It is a competitive advantage.
Retailers should protect the environments, insights and experiences that make their propositions distinctive. Those differences should be the reason an advertiser chooses one network over another, not the complexity required to buy it.
The goal is simple: keep the value of retail media distinctive, but make it easy to buy. When advertisers decide where their next pound or dollar goes, friction should never be the deciding factor.
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