Retail media has a problem. Everyone wants to be different; yet increasingly everyone is different in exactly the same way.
That was perhaps the unintended takeaway from Showcase, the inaugural retail and commerce media upfront held in New York on 2 September. Organised by Ascendant Network, the event brought 15 retail and commerce media businesses together to pitch themselves to agencies and advertisers, with networks spanning The Home Depot, Albertsons, DoorDash, PayPal, Macy’s, Chase, Instacart, Walgreens and others. Amazon and Walmart, tellingly, were not among them.
On the surface, there was plenty of variety. Home improvement, grocery, delivery, payments, banking, petcare, pharmacy and department stores were all represented. Underneath, however, many of the pitches were addressing the same problem: now that almost every sizeable retailer or commerce business can offer first-party data, closed-loop measurement, onsite advertising, offsite activation and increasingly in-store, social, video and CTV inventory, what exactly makes one retail media network worth choosing over another?
Retail media, in other words, has developed an identity crisis. And it isn’t just an American one.
Everyone has data
At The Home Depot, Orange Apron Media talked about understanding the customer journey through everything from browsing to video viewing and interactions with its chatbot. More interestingly, it positioned home improvement purchases as signals of wider life moments: moving house, renovating, entertaining, downsizing or growing a business.
The pitch isn’t simply that Home Depot knows what someone bought. It is that it can infer what is happening in their life.
DoorDash made a similar argument from a very different direction. Its data shows how consumer needs change by day, category and occasion. It claims, for example, that health-food orders are 30% higher on Tuesdays than Fridays, while toothbrush ordering jumps almost 30% at weekends. Its proposition is therefore built around interpreting thousands of apparently mundane transactions as indicators of changing consumer intent.
PayPal went broader still. Because it sees transactions across merchants – as well as activity through Venmo – it argues that it can understand consumers beyond the confines of any individual retailer. Chase Media Solutions, meanwhile, is making a similar play around its huge pool of payments data, with more than $1.9 trillion in debit and credit sales passing through Chase in 2025.
All of these are compelling propositions, but they also reveal the problem: almost everyone now has a version of the sentence: our unique data helps us understand customers better.
If everyone has unique data, uniqueness starts to become surprisingly commonplace.
Finding something only you can own
This is why some of the more interesting pitches in New York weren’t really about adtech at all – they are about the growing need to understand customers in other contexts, as is being explored at the CustomerX event in London next month and across a raft of pieces on the CustomerX substack.
For instance, Macy’s emphasised its position around major shopping and life events – weddings, graduations, moving home and Christmas – arguing that it can help brands create demand rather than simply harvest demand already generated elsewhere.
Dick’s Sporting Goods focused on youth sport, using its retail footprint and GameChanger streaming platform to position itself around a particular community and culture that can attract advertisers well beyond sporting goods.
Albertsons went in yet another direction, highlighting content. Its Rico’s Tacos campaign turned branded retail media into a miniature sitcom distributed online and through in-store screens. According to the retailer, ad placements alongside the videos beat benchmarks by 200%.
These pitches point towards what the next stage of retail media differentiation may actually look like.
The winners won’t necessarily be the networks with the most ad formats. They will be the ones that can answer a much simpler question: what can an advertiser do with you that it cannot do, or cannot do as well, somewhere else?
That distinction might come from audience, context, geography, category expertise, creativity, loyalty, physical stores or a particular point in the customer’s life. But it needs to be something more meaningful than another dashboard containing ROAS.
The paradox of maturity
The same issue is becoming increasingly apparent in Europe. There are now more than 140 retail media networks operating across EMEA, according to IAB UK, while IAB Europe’s own capability map has been created specifically to help brands compare networks across onsite, offsite, in-store, targeting and measurement capabilities.
That comparison is becoming necessary precisely because capabilities are converging. Indeed, research presented around Retail MediaX 2026 found that just over one in five respondents felt there was clear differentiation between retail media networks. The opportunity, respondents suggested, lies increasingly in data and measurement, unique audience characteristics and media sophistication.
This creates an interesting paradox. Retail media desperately needs standardisation. Brands cannot scale investment efficiently if every network measures impressions, attribution, incrementality and sales differently. IAB Europe’s latest Commerce Media Measurement Standards consequently formalise incrementality, standardise definitions of gross and net sales and seek to make reporting more comparable.
Yet the more standardised the mechanics become, the more networks need to differentiate everything sitting above them. Measurement should become boringly consistent, the proposition should not.
A global problem
Australia shows how universal this challenge is becoming. IAB Australia’s 2026 State of the Nation research finds retail media now a significant or regular activity for 87% of the advertising decision-makers surveyed. But measurement remains its defining challenge, particularly inconsistent metrics, limited incrementality measurement and omnichannel attribution.
Meanwhile in the UK, dunnhumby’s recently launched network alliance – initially involving Tesco, B&Q, John Lewis and Waitrose – is explicitly trying to reduce fragmentation by giving advertisers a route to audiences and inventory across multiple retailers.
That points towards another possible outcome of the identity crisis: aggregation. As buying becomes easier across networks, individual retailers will have even less ability to compete merely on access to inventory. Retail media’s plumbing may increasingly become interconnected, automated and eventually AI-mediated.
What remains valuable will be what cannot easily be standardised – the relationship with the customer. The circumstances in which they shop. The category expertise a retailer possesses. Its physical presence. Its culture, content, communities and understanding of particular moments.
The New York Showcase demonstrated that retail media is growing up. Holding an upfront at all indicates an industry confident enough to compete for budgets traditionally spent on television, video and other mainstream media.
But competing for those budgets changes the question advertisers ask. It is no longer simply: Do you have a retail media network? increasingly, it is: Why yours?
For hundreds of retail and commerce media networks around the world, finding a convincing answer may now be the most important part of their strategy.
