GUEST COMMENT Retail media is booming and accountability must keep pace 

Retail Media investment continues to rise, but rapid growth inevitably brings greater scrutiny. Marie-Clare Puffett, Senior Director, Industry Development & Marketing, IAB Europe, explains why independent certification offers the industry a chance to build trust before questions around transparency and measurement intensify.

Retail Media has moved a long way in a short time. It is now one of the fastest-growing areas in digital advertising, and with that scale has come a change in how it is judged. The budgets flowing into Retail Media are no longer experimental. They sit alongside search, social and the rest of the media plan, and they are increasingly being held to the same standards of accountability as everything else an advertiser buys.

For much of the last few years, the sector was given room to grow without that scrutiny. During a land-grab phase, buyers accepted a degree of inconsistency in exchange for reach and results. Metrics were often defined differently from one network to the next, reporting was largely self-declared, and comparing performance across retailers was more art than science. That was a reasonable trade while the category was finding its feet. It is a trade that looks less comfortable now that Retail Media is a core line in the plan.

The money keeps moving into the space and the growth figures make the trajectory clear. That is exactly the moment to be careful, because we have seen a version of this before. Other channels went through their own boom, when scale and results mattered more than the finer questions of transparency, quality and fraud. Those questions did not disappear. They resurfaced once the initial rush settled, and the industry spent years, and no small amount of trust, retrofitting the accountability it could have built in earlier. Retail Media is young enough to take the other path and to put verification in place before the same concerns arrive.

The question advertisers ask is starting to change. It is moving from “what results did this campaign deliver?” to “how do we know those results are real, defined consistently, and comparable with everyone else we work with?” As spend consolidates across multiple retailers and multiple markets, that second question becomes unavoidable. A media buyer cannot build a credible cross-retailer investment case on numbers that each network has marked itself against. They need a common yardstick and they need confidence that someone independent has checked the working.

This is the gap independent certification is built to close. IAB Europe’s Retail Media Certification Programme assesses a network’s measurement against a shared set of standards for both on-site and off-site Retail Media, and it does so through an independent audit rather than a self-assessment. The distinction matters. Plenty of frameworks invite a company to describe its own practices, whereas certification of this kind sends an independent auditor in to verify them, and only then attaches an industry-recognised mark to the result. For a buyer, that is the difference between a claim and a checked fact.

What makes the approach workable in practice is that it does not treat Retail Media as a single monolithic thing. A network can validate specific parts of its offering, which reflects how these businesses actually operate. Nectar360, for example, achieved certification covering its display and video products across off-site properties, the first UK retail media network to do so.

Albert Heijn was certified as one of the first two retailers in the programme. Several more Retail Media Networks and ad tech companies are now moving through the process, with the first ad tech company to receive its Retail Media Certification badge imminently.  

The direction of travel is not confined to Europe either. The programme is being aligned with established national frameworks, and in the US the Media Rating Council can coordinate its accreditation of measurement providers with the requirements of the European certification. Furthermore, IAB Australia recently launched a local adaptation of the IAB Europe Certification Programme, with Coles as the first major local retailer to enter the certification process. When standards start to converge across markets, they move from a differentiator towards a baseline.

For retailers and networks, the strategic read is straightforward. Certification is a way to stand out today, and if Retail Media follows the path of other fast-growing areas of digital advertising, that advantage will not remain rare forever. As and when more advertisers write independent measurement into their briefs and procurement processes, the networks that can point to a certified, audited position will be ready for the conversation, while those that can’t may spend the meeting explaining the gap. Getting certified now is less about chasing a badge than about being prepared for the questions that tend to follow a boom.

Retail Media is going through the same professionalisation seen across every maturing area of advertising. The land-grab gives way to accountability, self-declared numbers give way to verified ones, and the market settles on a common language it can trust. Independent certification is a central piece of that infrastructure, and the moment to engage with it is before those questions arrive in force rather than after. The networks that understand this will not be reacting to the shift. They will have helped set the standard the rest of the market is measured against.

Learn more about the IAB Europe Certification programme here.