Brands will put more money into commerce media when the channel can prove it creates sales that would not otherwise have happened, according to a survey of 281 professionals in a 36-page report titled "The Commerce Media Connection Gap," written by SMG, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and IAB UK. Asked without prompting what would convince them to raise investment, 46% of the brand respondents who answered named proven, measurable ROI and incremental sales impact. No other theme reached 8%.

The report carries no publication date beyond the year 2026. Its fieldwork ran in July and August 2026, and SMG's Sean Crawford was citing its findings in a sponsored article on Adweek dated October 19, 2026.

In Short

Three groups that buy and sell ads on shop websites, apps and in-store screens were asked where the system breaks down, and most said the pieces work on their own but do not join up. That matters to every brand paying several retailers at once, because separate briefs, reports and measurement methods make it hard to know what any of the money achieved. What would change minds is evidence: nearly half of brands said they would spend more only if retailers could prove the ads added sales.

Who wrote the report and how

The research was carried out jointly by SMG, the IAB and IAB UK. SMG, founded in 2008, describes itself in the report as "the world's first full-service connected commerce group," selling consultancy, embedded services and its PlanApps technology to retailers that run media networks. The report lists the networks SMG works with, as Boots Media Group, Morrisons Media Group, LS Eleven Media Services, Deliveroo Media, Co-op Media Network, Very Media Group and WHS Media. Executives from four of those - Deliveroo, Morrisons Media Group, Co-op Media Network and WHS Media - are quoted in the report alongside three SMG staff. The report's final page invites readers to contact SMG about their commerce media goals.

The IAB says its membership comprises more than 700 media companies, brands, agencies and technology firms. IAB UK says it represents almost 300 businesses across the digital advertising industry.

According to the methodology page, the survey covered 281 respondents in the UK, the US, Europe (France, Germany and Spain) and Australia: 168 brands and advertisers, 52 agencies and 61 retail and commerce media networks. Respondents answered a combination of common questions and audience-specific ones, so the base changes from chart to chart. Open-ended answers were coded into a single primary theme, with the coding reviewed by the research partners, and percentages for those questions reflect the share of valid responses assigned to each theme.

Several things are missing. The report gives no breakdown by country, no margin of error, no description of how respondents were recruited and no indication of weighting. Most charts say only "base varies by question." Subgroup figures rest on small numbers. If all 61 network respondents answered a given question, 23% would equate to about 14 people and 10% to about six, by PPC Land's calculation.

Reporting, not activation, is where the gaps sit

The report's core finding concerns where commerce media fails to join up. Asked which areas are least connected, respondents most often picked reporting, at 34%. Creative followed at 30%, consumer insights at 29% and planning and measurement at 28%. Activation, the act of getting media live, was chosen by 17%.

The three groups broadly agreed. Reporting was named by 31% of brands, 40% of agencies and 36% of retail media networks. Creative was picked by 31%, 27% and 30% respectively.

A separate question forced respondents to choose a single stage of the workflow most in need of improvement. Creative led at 18%, planning and measurement each drew 15%, and activation came last at 6%.

Overall sentiment is lukewarm rather than hostile. 54% rate the industry 7 or above out of 10 on how well connected commerce media is as a whole. Only 17% give it a 9 or 10. At both ends of a campaign, consistency is rare: only 14% say multichannel campaigns are always planned from a single brief, and only 14% say they always receive unified reporting across channels.

"Commerce media doesn't need every retailer or channel to operate in the same way. It needs enough continuity across them that the consumer, business objective and campaign strategy don't get lost along the way," said Collin Colburn, vice president, commerce and retail media at the IAB, in the report.

Agency answers to an open question added texture. When asked what clients request that the industry still cannot reliably deliver, the leading theme was an end-to-end, real-time system connecting planning, activation, optimisation and measurement. One buyer, asked for their single biggest frustration, described "the exhausting manual task of logging into multiple dashboards to stitch fragmented reports together."

The report does not let buyers off the hook. It argues that "buyers cannot expect connected outputs from fragmented inputs," pointing to separate briefs, objectives and budgets across brand, shopper, trade and media teams inside advertisers.

Jessie Bove Dowd, independent journalist and founder of The Commerce Society, framed the problem in organisational terms. "The challenge haunting commerce media the last few years remains largely present: siloization. Retail media's origins inherently grew in a silo, and despite growing efforts to transform organizational structures, it persists even among leading organizations," she said in the report.

On creative, Andrew Lipsman, founder and chief analyst at Media, Ads + Commerce, said: "Creative has historically driven at least 50% of advertising effectiveness but often gets overlooked in retail media." The report does not cite a source for the 50% figure.

The nine-step model

The authors propose what they call a Connected Campaign System of nine linked stages: business objective, audience strategy, one brief, coordinated channel roles, connected creative, cross-channel activation, shared optimisation, unified measurement and learning. The premise is that the same objective and audience strategy should carry through every stage even where execution differs by channel. The report repeats one line throughout: "Connection does not mean standardisation."

The hard part is buying across retailers

When the survey turned to retail networks themselves, the problem shifted from inside a single retailer to across several. 23% of network respondents named cross-retailer activation as the hardest capability to scale commercially. In-store and AI each drew 16%. Audience activation itself drew 10%.

Each network, the report notes, may have its own data structures, audience definitions, technology partners, creative specifications, buying processes and measurement methods. "What looks differentiated from within the network can look fragmented from outside," the authors write.

Marie-Clare Puffett, senior director, industry development and marketing at IAB Europe, described the buyer's position. "A campaign that runs across several Retail Media Networks, and often across several European markets, means reconciling different definitions, different measurement approaches, and different reporting before you can compare like with like, and that makes both planning and confident investment harder than they should be," she said in the report.

That complaint is not new. IAB Europe's 2025 Attitudes to Retail Media report found 51% of buyers affected by fragmentation across networks and 53% by a lack of standardisation. In May 2026 the IAB opened Campaign Data Standards 1.0 for public comment, an attempt to give platforms a common set of classifications and data fields so teams spend less time reconciling reports.

Who should fix it

Responsibility is contested. 29% of all respondents say everyone has equal responsibility for improving connection, and only 5% say networks alone carry the greatest responsibility. Among agencies, 31% say agencies should carry the greatest responsibility - and 26% of networks agree.

The authors see a tension in that result. Networks appear to want agencies to coordinate a connected model, but agencies, in the report's words, "will need deeper commerce media fluency if they are to fulfil that role effectively."

Dean Harris of Co-op Media Network, whose job title is cut off in the report, put the network view this way: "Connection without compromise is where commerce media needs to go: connecting the touchpoints buyers want to buy while allowing RMNs to protect what makes their proposition distinctive."

In-store: highest promise, hardest to connect

Physical stores produced the starkest split in the data. Across the full sample, 47% identify an in-store channel as creating the greatest incremental value when connected, with in-store digital first at 28%. Almost as many, 41%, identify an in-store channel as the hardest to connect.

The answers differ sharply by where each group sits:

  • Brands: 38% picked in-store digital and 20% in-store physical, for 58% choosing an in-store environment overall. Onsite drew 19%, offsite social 14%, CTV 7%, display 2% and other 1%.
  • Retail networks: 39% picked onsite. In-store physical drew 21%, offsite social 20%, in-store digital 13%, CTV 5% and display 2%.
  • Agencies: the report says 42% favour offsite environments, against 31% for onsite.

The agency chart is less clear than the others. It labels 42% as "offsite social specifically" and also states that 42% select an offsite environment in aggregate, which would leave no agency respondent choosing CTV or display. The report does not resolve this.

The authors suggest each group favours the environment closest to its own business. Brands may see the store as untapped upside near the moment of purchase. Agencies lean toward offsite because it connects commerce media to the rest of the media plan. Networks favour onsite, where they "retain significant control over inventory, data, activation, and measurement." The report concedes it "does not reveal precisely why" the views differ and says whether operational complexity explains the gap "requires further exploration."

"As commerce media evolves, success will come from connecting every touchpoint across the customer journey, not treating them as separate channels. In-store media is especially powerful because it reaches shoppers at the moment purchase decisions are being made," said Austin Leonard, vice president and general manager of DG Media Network, Dollar General's retail media business, in the report.

Katie Blackburn, vice president commercial strategy and operations at WHS Media, which sells advertising in travel retail, said: "Screens, audio, experiential activity, and digital extensions should not be separate buys. They should form one experience around what the traveler needs in that moment, supported by planning and measurement that make the complexity invisible to the advertiser."

Sean Crawford, SMG's managing director for North America, added: "In-store is where the ambition of Connected Commerce meets operational reality. Shoppers don't experience digital screens, static media, onsite, and offsite as separate channels - they experience one journey."

Other research points the same way. On October 1, 2026, an IAB and Grocery TV survey of 100 US buyers found 43% saying their organisation underuses its in-store retail media investment, with 27% citing measurement limitations as a top barrier. Weeks earlier, IAB Europe opened Version 2 of its in-store measurement standards, cutting the impression calculation to six inputs. In June, Broadsign and Mirakl Ads announced a partnership to link online and in-store retail media.

AI: biggest advantage and most overhyped

Respondents hold two views of AI at once. 44% say it will create the biggest competitive advantage in commerce media over the next three years, while 39% call it the industry's most overhyped capability today. The report does not say how many respondents gave both answers.

The authors' position is that AI can adapt creative, synthesise reports and coordinate workflows, but cannot reconcile competing objectives or make different measurement methods equivalent. "AI can automate coordination. It cannot automate alignment," the report states. It sets out three conditions: define the outcome before automating, start with trusted data and common definitions, and keep people accountable for material decisions on budgets, measurement, customer privacy and brand safety. It also warns that if brands, agencies and networks deploy different tools and agents across disconnected systems, AI "could add another layer of complexity."

Ollie Shayer, senior director, global strategy and innovation at SMG, said AI "cannot compensate for unclear objectives, fragmented data, incompatible systems, or organisational silos. AI will be most valuable when applied on top of connected foundations, rather than being expected to create those foundations itself."

What brands say would unlock budget

The commercial section returns to the headline figure. 46% of brands spontaneously identified proven, measurable ROI and incremental sales impact as what would convince them to invest more. The report puts that at "approximately 74 of the 161 brands answering the question." The next themes were well behind: better operational alignment and cross-channel execution at 7%, consumer relevance and protecting the shopping experience at 6%, and more available budget or lower investment costs at 6%.

Brands, the authors argue, "are not primarily saying: give us more inventory. They are not primarily saying: make it cheaper." They draw a line between reported results and causal ones: strong reported sales or ROAS "do not necessarily prove that advertising caused an outcome that would not otherwise have happened."

That distinction is the subject of the IAB and IAB Europe guidelines for incremental measurement in commerce media, released on November 3, 2025, which ranked experiments above model-based counterfactuals, econometric models and proxies such as platform-reported lift. Separately, a June 2026 study by Incremental estimated that siloed attribution misses 36% to 53% of total retail media impact, with in-store and off-retailer sales falling outside single-retailer reporting.

Brand confidence in networks is moderate. 58% of brands rate their confidence that networks can deliver genuinely connected commerce media at 7 out of 10 or higher, with an average of about 6.9. Only 20% give a 9 or 10.

"Advertisers, merchants, and sales teams need to understand whether media is moving the total business and creating outcomes that would not otherwise have happened," said Molly Hjelm, corporate vice president, retail media at RedVest Media, in the report.

The report also cautions against reducing every campaign to short-term sales. It argues incrementality should be measured "against the objective the campaign was designed to deliver," which could include brand impact, category growth and customer experience. How such measures would be standardised across networks is not addressed.

James Chandler, chief strategy officer at IAB UK, said: "The industry has no shortage of capability. The next challenge is making that capability work together across retailers, channels and systems and that connection is not something any single network can deliver alone. Brands, agencies and retail media networks each have a part to play."

Lee LeFeuvre, SMG's interim chief executive, said: "No single retailer, agency, brand or technology partner can solve that alone. The opportunity now is to make an increasingly sophisticated ecosystem simpler to navigate, easier to measure, and ultimately more valuable for everyone involved."

What the evidence does not establish

The survey measures perceptions, not spending or campaign results. It does not show that connected campaigns outperform disconnected ones; the "Connected Commerce Growth Loop" in the report, which runs from better planning to greater investment, is presented as a hypothesis, with words such as "should" and "potentially" throughout. "Connected" itself is not defined for respondents in the published material.

The 46% figure comes from coded open-text answers, so it reflects how the research partners grouped free-form responses into single themes. A brand that mentioned both ROI and simpler buying would count under only one.

The authorship also matters. SMG sells consultancy, services and orchestration technology to retail networks, and the report's conclusions - that the ecosystem needs coordination, interoperability and simpler buying - describe the kind of work SMG offers. Several quoted contributors run networks SMG lists as its own clients. None of this makes the figures wrong, but readers have no independent dataset to check them against.

Why this matters for marketers

Retail media is no longer a side budget. IAB Europe put European retail media spend at EUR 13.7 billion in 2024, up 21.1%, forecasting EUR 20.8 billion for 2026. In the UK, IAB UK reported online retail media at GBP 1.5 billion in the first half of 2025. As more of that money is spread across several retailers, the cost of reconciling incompatible reports grows with it.

The findings line up with other recent surveys PPC Land has covered. Winterberry Group and Lifesight found only 9% of 121 US executives could practise unified measurement "extremely well". The common thread is a gap between how many channels advertisers can buy and how well they can judge them together.

For buyers, the report's practical claim is narrow: retail networks will be judged less on how many placements they offer than on how easily those placements plug into a wider plan and how credibly they prove incremental sales. For networks, the split on in-store versus onsite suggests their own priorities do not match what brands say they value most. Whether networks, agencies or brands move first remains unanswered by the data.

Timeline

Summary

Who: SMG, a commerce media consultancy and services group founded in 2008, together with the Interactive Advertising Bureau and IAB UK, surveying 168 brands, 52 agencies and 61 retail and commerce media networks.

What: A 36-page report, "The Commerce Media Connection Gap," finding that reporting is the least connected part of commerce media (34%), that only 14% of respondents say campaigns are always planned from one brief, that 47% see in-store as the most valuable channel to connect while 41% call it the hardest, and that 46% of brands would be persuaded to invest more by proven ROI and incremental sales impact.

When: Fieldwork ran in July and August 2026. The report is dated only 2026; SMG was citing it publicly by October 19, 2026.

Where: Respondents were based in the UK, the US, France, Germany, Spain and Australia. No results are broken out by country.

Why: As advertisers spread budgets across more retailers and channels, separate briefs, reports and measurement methods make it harder to judge what commerce media delivers, and brands say proof of incremental sales, not more inventory or lower prices, is what would unlock further spending.