Most in-store content today is repurposed. A brand shoots a TV commercial or a social video, then resizes it for a retail screen and calls it in-store advertising – but there are much better ways to leverage content instore, says Paul Brenner, Senior Vice President of Retail Media and Partnerships at ISM.
Albertsons and P&G did something different. They built a scripted series called “Rico’s Tacos” specifically for Albertsons stores, filmed with real associates and launched across YouTube, social and in-store screens. Shopper insights shaped the story before a single scene was written, and Albertsons Media Collective helped shape that story alongside P&G rather than approving a finished asset for placement.
That difference points to where retail media is headed, and it raises a problem the industry hasn’t solved yet. Content this ambitious needs a measurement approach built for what it actually is – one that accounts for the store, the shopper and the story together — in addition to how this inventory gets bought and sold. Brands are committing real production budgets to this kind of content, and impressions alone can’t tell them whether that investment is actually earning its place on the shelf.
Branded retail content is spreading across the industry
Albertsons and P&G aren’t the only ones betting on original content built around a retail environment:
- Walmart Connect partnered with VIZIO on “Backyard Escapes,” a branded content series distributed across CTV, Walmart’s website and in-store. Walmart Connect reported a 37% sales lift for participating brands, tying the content directly to purchase behavior rather than just reach.
- Instacart launched Instacart Ads Studio, a creative services arm that pairs its shopper data with CPG brands from the start of the creative process. The studio also introduced a short-form video feed built around meals and recipes, giving brands another format for content that lives inside the shopping experience itself instead of running alongside it.
Retailers are moving beyond simply selling space for someone else’s ad by building the content that runs on it. Grocery, big-box and retail delivery are different businesses, but each one is moving in the same direction.
Why is instore a complicated part of the equation?
Onsite and offsite retail media still carry a digital signal, something like a click or a cookie that traces a path from impression to cart. That one-to-one link breaks down the moment content moves instore. A screen doesn’t know which specific shopper walked past it on their way to the dairy case, only that a certain number of people were in range to see it.
The absence of this one-to-one link gets harder to ignore now that brands are producing scripted series and original entertainment for these screens instead of a static product ad. A flagship store with heavy foot traffic and a shopper base that already engages with the retailer is a different opportunity than a low-traffic location most people pass through on autopilot. Yet most in-store measurement treats every store the same way, running the identical attribution model regardless of what’s actually happening on the floor.
The industry keeps reaching for attribution models built for one-to-one digital tracking because that’s what digital media has trained everyone to expect. This is the case despite in-store delivering exposure at scale to many shoppers at once instead of a trackable path for any single one.
A 2025 Bain & Company and eMarketer survey found that 48% of retail media network respondents named measurement and attribution the top challenge in the space, and that gap only widens for in-store, where the exposure model itself doesn’t match the one-to-one tools being used to measure it.
Store traffic, shopper mission and the physical environment shape whether a shopper buys the product far more than a raw impression count on its own can show. An attribution model built to trace one shopper’s individual path can’t be applied in-store, and forcing it anyway is what keeps in-store advertising undervalued relative to the sales it may actually be driving.
What’s actually blocking measurement, and why now?
Commerce media is projected to grow 12.1% in 2026, according to IAB’s 2026 Outlook Study, part of a broader wave of double-digit growth across digital channels alongside social media and connected TV. That growth means more digital media moving into retail environments, and more of it landing in-store, where the standard measurement toolkit still falls short.
Marketing Mix Modeling is one of the tools brands lean on to fill that gap. It’s an older, statistical method that estimates how much a channel contributed to sales by studying variation in spend and results over time (without tracking any individual shopper).
That approach works well for channels that run in short bursts, like a seasonal TV campaign, because the model can isolate what changed when the spend changed. In-store retail media can run consistently instead of stopping and starting between campaigns, and MMM systematically undercounts the impact of commerce channels that behave this way.
Branded entertainment complicates the picture further because it isn’t judged the same way a media buy is judged. A guaranteed-view ad succeeds if it delivers the views it promised. A scripted series succeeds if shoppers choose to keep watching.
In-store branded entertainment carries that bet on top of the attribution problem MMM already struggles with, since it has to hold attention in the moment and still show up in a measurement model built for steady, always-on spend rather than a single piece of content earning its audience.
What better in-store measurement has to account for
Store-level context has to become part of the measurement itself. A flagship location with heavy foot traffic and a loyal shopper base is producing a different outcome than a low-traffic store, even when the same content runs in both, and treating those two results as equivalent hides more than it reveals.
The same goes for format. A screen near the entrance and a screen at the shelf aren’t reaching the same shopper at the same moment in their trip, and measurement needs to reflect that difference instead of averaging it away.
Shopper mission matters just as much. Someone running in for one item is a different audience than someone doing a full weekly shop, and content that works for one may do nothing for the other. View counts and completion rates still show whether content held attention, which matters for a scripted series or a piece of entertainment. What they can’t show on their own is whether that attention turned into a purchase.
Closing that gap between exposure and purchase means connecting what happens on screen to what happens at the register, store by store and shopper by shopper, until the measurement reflects the environment the content actually ran in.
Brands are already spending against this kind of content, and that spending isn’t slowing down. The retailers who figure out how to measure it in a way that reflects the store itself will turn a single campaign into a standing part of how brands invest in-store.
Author
Paul Brenner is Senior Vice President of Retail Media and Partnerships at ISM
You are in: Home » Retail Media » GUEST COMMENT The store is part of the story: why retail media’s content boom requires a new approach to measurement
GUEST COMMENT The store is part of the story: why retail media’s content boom requires a new approach to measurement
Paul Brenner
Most in-store content today is repurposed. A brand shoots a TV commercial or a social video, then resizes it for a retail screen and calls it in-store advertising – but there are much better ways to leverage content instore, says Paul Brenner, Senior Vice President of Retail Media and Partnerships at ISM.
Albertsons and P&G did something different. They built a scripted series called “Rico’s Tacos” specifically for Albertsons stores, filmed with real associates and launched across YouTube, social and in-store screens. Shopper insights shaped the story before a single scene was written, and Albertsons Media Collective helped shape that story alongside P&G rather than approving a finished asset for placement.
That difference points to where retail media is headed, and it raises a problem the industry hasn’t solved yet. Content this ambitious needs a measurement approach built for what it actually is – one that accounts for the store, the shopper and the story together — in addition to how this inventory gets bought and sold. Brands are committing real production budgets to this kind of content, and impressions alone can’t tell them whether that investment is actually earning its place on the shelf.
Branded retail content is spreading across the industry
Albertsons and P&G aren’t the only ones betting on original content built around a retail environment:
Retailers are moving beyond simply selling space for someone else’s ad by building the content that runs on it. Grocery, big-box and retail delivery are different businesses, but each one is moving in the same direction.
Why is instore a complicated part of the equation?
Onsite and offsite retail media still carry a digital signal, something like a click or a cookie that traces a path from impression to cart. That one-to-one link breaks down the moment content moves instore. A screen doesn’t know which specific shopper walked past it on their way to the dairy case, only that a certain number of people were in range to see it.
The absence of this one-to-one link gets harder to ignore now that brands are producing scripted series and original entertainment for these screens instead of a static product ad. A flagship store with heavy foot traffic and a shopper base that already engages with the retailer is a different opportunity than a low-traffic location most people pass through on autopilot. Yet most in-store measurement treats every store the same way, running the identical attribution model regardless of what’s actually happening on the floor.
The industry keeps reaching for attribution models built for one-to-one digital tracking because that’s what digital media has trained everyone to expect. This is the case despite in-store delivering exposure at scale to many shoppers at once instead of a trackable path for any single one.
A 2025 Bain & Company and eMarketer survey found that 48% of retail media network respondents named measurement and attribution the top challenge in the space, and that gap only widens for in-store, where the exposure model itself doesn’t match the one-to-one tools being used to measure it.
Store traffic, shopper mission and the physical environment shape whether a shopper buys the product far more than a raw impression count on its own can show. An attribution model built to trace one shopper’s individual path can’t be applied in-store, and forcing it anyway is what keeps in-store advertising undervalued relative to the sales it may actually be driving.
What’s actually blocking measurement, and why now?
Commerce media is projected to grow 12.1% in 2026, according to IAB’s 2026 Outlook Study, part of a broader wave of double-digit growth across digital channels alongside social media and connected TV. That growth means more digital media moving into retail environments, and more of it landing in-store, where the standard measurement toolkit still falls short.
Marketing Mix Modeling is one of the tools brands lean on to fill that gap. It’s an older, statistical method that estimates how much a channel contributed to sales by studying variation in spend and results over time (without tracking any individual shopper).
That approach works well for channels that run in short bursts, like a seasonal TV campaign, because the model can isolate what changed when the spend changed. In-store retail media can run consistently instead of stopping and starting between campaigns, and MMM systematically undercounts the impact of commerce channels that behave this way.
Branded entertainment complicates the picture further because it isn’t judged the same way a media buy is judged. A guaranteed-view ad succeeds if it delivers the views it promised. A scripted series succeeds if shoppers choose to keep watching.
In-store branded entertainment carries that bet on top of the attribution problem MMM already struggles with, since it has to hold attention in the moment and still show up in a measurement model built for steady, always-on spend rather than a single piece of content earning its audience.
What better in-store measurement has to account for
Store-level context has to become part of the measurement itself. A flagship location with heavy foot traffic and a loyal shopper base is producing a different outcome than a low-traffic store, even when the same content runs in both, and treating those two results as equivalent hides more than it reveals.
The same goes for format. A screen near the entrance and a screen at the shelf aren’t reaching the same shopper at the same moment in their trip, and measurement needs to reflect that difference instead of averaging it away.
Shopper mission matters just as much. Someone running in for one item is a different audience than someone doing a full weekly shop, and content that works for one may do nothing for the other. View counts and completion rates still show whether content held attention, which matters for a scripted series or a piece of entertainment. What they can’t show on their own is whether that attention turned into a purchase.
Closing that gap between exposure and purchase means connecting what happens on screen to what happens at the register, store by store and shopper by shopper, until the measurement reflects the environment the content actually ran in.
Brands are already spending against this kind of content, and that spending isn’t slowing down. The retailers who figure out how to measure it in a way that reflects the store itself will turn a single campaign into a standing part of how brands invest in-store.
Author
Paul Brenner is Senior Vice President of Retail Media and Partnerships at ISM
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