Retail media is the fastest-growing paid channel in the industry. Depending on which analyst report you read, global retail-media spend is somewhere between £110bn and £160bn annually and growing at 15-22% year-over-year. The channel is, on its face, well-positioned: retailers control valuable transactional inventory (checkout journeys, product-listing pages, on-site search results), can offer advertisers first-party audience data of unusual quality, and can measure downstream conversion with granularity that most other channels cannot match.
All of these things are true. What is also true — and what the trade press has been slower to write about — is that the operational practices most retail-media platforms are currently offering to advertisers include a substantial number of practices that the open programmatic ecosystem, over the last decade, learned to reject after painful experience. This dispatch is about that pattern, and why it deserves buyer-side scrutiny that it has not yet received.
Three practices that should worry a mature buyer
The first is closed-loop attribution reporting where the platform is both the seller of the ad and the arbiter of whether the ad drove the conversion. In open programmatic, this arrangement was rejected roughly a decade ago as inherently conflicted; the industry moved toward third-party verification and independent attribution because the alternative was untenable. Retail-media platforms almost universally report attribution using their own internal models, which the advertiser cannot audit, and which have — for the specific reason of the platform's commercial incentive — a systematic bias toward crediting the platform's own placements.
The second is inventory-composition opacity. In open programmatic, buyers now expect (and, increasingly, receive) domain-level and slot-level delivery reporting that lets them audit where their spend actually landed. In retail-media, most platforms report at the aggregate campaign level only; the buyer receives a total impression count, an aggregate CTR, and an attributed conversion count, without meaningful visibility into which specific placements, in which specific contexts, delivered the outcomes. The equivalent visibility in open programmatic would be considered inadequate for a mature buyer.
The third is viewability and delivery-quality standards below what the open programmatic ecosystem now expects. Most retail-media platforms do not, currently, deliver Media Rating Council-compliant viewability reporting. Most do not integrate with independent verification vendors. Where these integrations exist, they are typically partial and require additional negotiation to activate. The advertiser buying retail-media impressions is, in most cases, buying against a delivery-quality standard that a comparable open-programmatic purchase would not be permitted to run under.
Why this persists
The reason the retail-media offer includes these practices is not primarily that retail-media platforms are unusually cynical. It is that the retail-media category has grown faster than the buyer-side infrastructure to hold it to open-programmatic standards.
Most retail-media budgets, in the accounts we audit, sit in a specific commercial position within the advertiser's organisation. They are, typically, negotiated as part of a broader trading relationship with the retailer — combined with slotting fees, promotional support, joint business plans — and the negotiation is conducted by trade or category teams rather than by paid media teams. The people signing the retail-media contracts are, in most cases, people whose primary expertise is in retail-trading relationships, not in the operational nuances of ad-verification.
The result is that the retail-media platforms have been able to sell into the advertising ecosystem without the level of buyer-side interrogation that programmatic platforms encountered. This is not entirely the retail-media platforms' fault. It is, on the whole, the fault of a buying structure that has allowed retail-media purchases to be made by people whose training does not include the questions the retail-media platforms should be asked.
"Programmatic buyers spent a decade fighting for supply-side transparency, and won. The retail-media category is currently being sold under commercial terms that would not survive fifteen minutes of programmatic-buyer scrutiny. The industry deserves a version of retail media that meets its own historic standards. It does not, currently, have one."
What to ask
If you are currently running retail-media spend and would like to hold the category to the operational standard your programmatic team would apply, three specific questions worth introducing into your next retail-media negotiation.
First: what is your attribution methodology, in specific terms? Ask the platform to describe how it credits conversions to specific ad impressions, over what attribution window, using what identifier logic. Ask what share of conversions are observed versus modelled. Ask whether the methodology has been independently reviewed. Vague answers here should be considered a substantive negotiation point, not an incidental one.
Second: what visibility do we get into delivery composition? Ask for delivery reporting at the placement or context level, not just at the campaign level. Ask whether specific product listings, specific category pages, or specific search-result surfaces can be included or excluded from delivery. Ask what share of delivery falls into each context type.
Third: what independent verification is available? Ask which third-party verification vendors integrate with the platform, at what level of granularity, and at what cost. Ask whether MRC-compliant viewability reporting is available. Ask whether the platform's reported metrics have been audited by an independent party.
The retail-media platforms are, on our current sample, mostly unaccustomed to being asked these questions. Their standard commercial packages do not include clear answers to any of them. But the platforms that respond substantively — and there are a few — are the ones worth spending against. The platforms that duck or deflect are the ones the industry should, over the next twelve months, apply visible commercial pressure to.
The retail-media category is not going away. It is producing genuine value for a substantial number of advertisers. What is currently missing is the buyer-side discipline that would ensure that value is fairly priced and honestly reported. Building that discipline is, on our reading, the most consequential unfinished work in the paid-media stack right now. It has been left, so far, to a small number of advertisers with the internal sophistication and negotiating capacity to hold the retail-media platforms to programmatic-grade standards. It needs to become the industry's default expectation. The window for making it so is still open.