In-Store Marketplace on April 7, 2026, released a research report arguing that the biggest obstacle to scaling digital in-store advertising is not a lack of technical measurement capability - it is a fundamental misalignment between the scorecards that brands, agencies, merchants, and retail media networks each use to define success.

The report, titled "In-Store Media Has a Measurement Problem - Just Not the One You Think," was produced by In-Store Marketplace (ISM) in partnership with Catalyst Media Consulting. It draws on interviews with brand, agency, and retail media executives across the United States and the United Kingdom. ISM describes itself as the retail industry's first centralized platform for digital in-store media integration, backed by parent company Mood Media.

The findings arrive at a moment when the retail media sector is under pressure to prove the value of physical store advertising. Retail media spending is projected to exceed $300 billion globally by 2030, according to Omdia research published in September 2025, and the physical store remains one of the least standardized parts of that growing ecosystem. The IAB and IAB Europe released the first industry-wide in-store retail media measurement standards for public comment in September 2024, a step toward common language around audience measurement and CPM-based buying. Yet the ISM report argues those efforts, while necessary, address only part of the problem.

The two gaps the industry has been conflating

According to the report, the industry has concentrated on what ISM and Catalyst Media Consulting call the measurement capability gap - the absence of sophisticated technical tools fit for physical retail environments. That gap is real. But the research identifies a second, deeper problem: a measurement alignment gap, where each stakeholder group evaluates the same in-store activation using an entirely different scorecard.

The report identifies four distinct scorecards in use across the ecosystem. Agencies apply a Media Mix Scorecard, asking how effective in-store is compared to other channels. Merchants use a Retail Sales Scorecard, focused on whether the activation moved product off the shelf. Retail media networks use a Media Revenue Scorecard, assessing whether the advertiser spend generated a positive return for the network. Brands operating through shopper marketing teams apply an Efficiency Scorecard, asking whether the investment fulfilled joint business plan commitments and drove category share growth.

Each of these scorecards serves a legitimate purpose, rooted in decades of commercial history. The problem, according to the research, is that they can produce contradictory verdicts on the same campaign. An activation that delivers strong verified impressions satisfies the Media Mix Scorecard but may leave the merchant unmoved if units did not shift. A campaign that drives volume may never register as a media success under the Media Revenue Scorecard if the attribution methodology does not capture it.

According to Collin Colburn, VP of Commerce and Retail Media at the IAB, "When a brand's media team demands one-to-one attribution to satisfy their Media Mix Scorecard, but the retail merchant cares about moving pallets to satisfy their Retail Sales Scorecard, gridlock occurs. We must stop treating measurement as a unilateral digital mandate and instead align our metrics to the mutual goal of all the parties."

The problem with importing digital logic into physical stores

Much of the in-store media industry has operated under what the report calls "digital envy" - the assumption that in-store advertising must replicate the one-to-one, closed-loop attribution framework of e-commerce in order to justify investment. According to Paul Brenner, SVP of Global Retail Media and Partnerships at ISM, "We've overcomplicated the problem by forcing digital thinking onto a channel that operates very differently. Brands ultimately measure success based on whether the product sells, and aligning measurement to that reality makes it far easier to justify investment."

The tension is technical as well as organizational. Closed-loop attribution in a physical store typically requires cameras, location tracking, or individual-level matching of an ad impression to a point-of-sale transaction. These approaches introduce consumer privacy concerns, and the report notes that retail media networks expressed significant reservations about measurement frameworks that depend on such technologies. Brands and agencies share some of that skepticism. As one unnamed agency executive is quoted in the research, "I just don't think [digital] attribution is good enough to try it in a channel that doesn't lend itself to attribution. I'd rather not see attribution get introduced into in-store and mess the whole thing up."

The CPG side of the equation adds another layer of complexity. The research found that consumer packaged goods companies already invest heavily in traditional in-store formats - endcaps, product placement, shelf-talkers, trade spend, sampling - through long-established budget processes and partnerships with companies such as Neptune and Inmar. Those legacy activations carry decades of performance data. A CPG executive quoted in the report noted: "I know with high precision how many sales I will get when I have a product on an endcap." Digital in-store, by contrast, still sits largely in test budgets rather than annual plans. One CPG respondent described internal resistance this way: "I'm pushing for in-store media, and a lot of the time senior leadership is saying, 'Others aren't doing it, so I don't have FOMO as a brand.'"

The structural divide between merchandising and retail media also creates friction. According to the report, retail media networks have taken ownership of digital in-store as an extension of their ad products. But CPGs and agencies continue to think of in-store investment - whether screens, audio, or physical displays - as a single category governed by trade and shopper marketing budgets. The result, the research argues, is that "bifurcating in-store between merchandising and retail media adds unnecessary complexity and stalls investment."

The Shopper Purchase Rate framework

To address these competing pressures, the report introduces a new measurement framework called the Shopper Purchase Rate (SPR). The framework is designed to sit within existing retail methodologies rather than replace them, giving all parties - merchants, brands, agencies, and retail media networks - a shared metric rooted in product movement.

SPR measures the rate at which product moves through each shopper segment, capturing three variables in a unified structure: dollars spent (at the SKU or brand level), units purchased (at the SKU or brand level), and shopper behavior disaggregated by segment type. The framework defines four shopper segments: loyal, occasional, lapsed, and new. These segments can be customized by retailer and product category. According to the report, what constitutes a "lapsed" shopper for a dairy brand will look different from the same designation applied to an over-the-counter pharmaceutical brand.

The methodology relies on matched-market tests and pre-versus-post analyses - approaches that the physical retail industry has used for decades and that do not require one-to-one ad exposure tracking. According to the research, "What merchants have proven for decades is that evaluating product movement doesn't require one-to-one attribution. We've added that complexity in the digital ecosystem because we needed to tie cookies or IDs from an ad impression to a transaction." By applying matched-market tests with digital in-store as the treatment group against a matched control group, the SPR methodology is designed to isolate incremental impact from the activation itself.

The report also introduces an incremental variant called iSPR, designed for situations where isolating the lift from a specific digital in-store element is the priority. Rather than reporting a flat return on ad spend figure, SPR and iSPR answer a more operationally useful question: which shopper segment bought more, and by how much?

Five CPG personas and tailored measurement applications

A separate section of the report identifies five distinct CPG buyer personas, each of which requires a different emphasis within the SPR framework.

The Category Leader is primarily concerned with defending or growing category share. The recommended RMN strategy is to augment existing trade investment, with primary KPIs set at matched-market dollar and unit lift. The SPR variant for this persona is iSPR.

The Omni-Channel Planner already maintains a strong relationship with the RMN and pursues shopper objectives across channels. The strategy focuses on augmenting shopper investment, with closed-loop iROAS as the primary KPI. Again, iSPR is the recommended measurement variant.

The Agency Planner thinks across both upper-funnel brand growth and lower-funnel conversion. The strategy is to augment brand investment, using delivery logs and sales impact via pre/post analysis as primary KPIs. Both SPR and iSPR apply.

The MMM-Reliant Brand finds that in-store underperforms in its media mix models, typically because the channel does not fit the attribution logic those models assume. The recommended strategy is to align digital in-store with digital-out-of-home, using awareness metrics on a one-to-many basis. Both SPR and iSPR apply here, giving the media mix model a product-movement input rather than a media impression input.

The Challenger Brand needs presence and awareness at the point of sale to drive adoption and share. The strategy is to be present at POS, with market share and pre/post sales impact as primary KPIs. Both SPR and iSPR apply.

The report acknowledges that these personas are not mutually exclusive. A Category Leader may also be heavily MMM-Reliant. The point of the taxonomy is to help retail media networks tailor their sales and measurement conversations to the specific decision-making context of each CPG partner.

Why measurement must connect to reinvestment

A recurring theme in the report is that measurement which does not lead to reinvestment is measurement that has failed. The SPR framework is explicitly designed to shift the conversation at the point of review from "Did this work?" to "How do we scale?" According to the research, that shift is what moves digital in-store from a line item in a test budget to a permanent fixture in the annual plan.

The merchant relationship is identified as critical to making that shift happen. The report emphasizes that merchants are still viewed by CPGs as the owners of the store. Any retail media strategy that bypasses or contradicts the merchant's priorities will face organizational resistance. Success, according to the research, requires joint business planning that centers on product movement and sales, not just media delivery metrics. One RMN executive respondent put it directly: "At the end of the day, it's less about the media sales, and it's more about did the product move or not."

The report does not position SPR as a replacement for the IAB's work on impression standardization, which IAB Europe extended with updated pan-European retail and commerce media definitions in March 2025. Rather, it argues that impression-based CPM buying establishes a necessary common language around audience but does not by itself answer the question that CPG budget holders ultimately ask. Impressions and dwell time are described as important KPIs whose value "compounds when combined with product-driven metrics."

Implications for the marketing industry

The release of this framework matters for several reasons that extend beyond the specific methodologies proposed.

First, the scorecard problem is not unique to in-store media. The tension between media-team attribution demands and trade-team product movement expectations exists across shopper marketing in general. IAB Ireland's retail media report from December 2025 identified a structurally similar challenge, noting that FMCG brands organize their teams and budgets into distinct silos - brand budgets, shopper marketing budgets, trade budgets, and digital marketing budgets - each with its own measurement logic. The ISM research suggests that in-store media sits at the intersection of all four, which is precisely what makes it difficult to evaluate and fund consistently.

Second, the privacy dimension is significant. Retail media networks operating in-store have to weigh the value of granular measurement against the legal and reputational risks of deploying cameras and location tracking at scale. The German retail body BVDW's September 2025 analysis of in-store advertising noted that geographic test design and pre/post analysis are among the recommended methodologies precisely because they do not require individual-level tracking. The ISM framework aligns with that guidance.

Third, the CPG investment that in-store media networks are trying to unlock is substantial. The research notes that CPGs already invest heavily in the physical store through trade and shopper marketing. The question is not whether brands will spend in stores - it is whether digital in-store can capture a portion of those existing budgets by speaking the language those budgets already respond to. A CPG respondent in the report made this point plainly: "Budget decisions are made based on more than RMN metrics - they focus on overall business ROI, elasticity, etc. Overall investment needs to be tied to something that will move cases."

For the broader retail media industry, currently tracking toward $300 billion in global spend by 2030, the physical store represents one of the last major frontiers for programmatic advertising. Yet it has attracted far less standardized investment than on-site sponsored products or off-site display. The ISM report's central argument - that the industry has been solving the wrong problem - offers a specific diagnosis and a testable remedy.

Timeline

Summary

Who: In-Store Marketplace (ISM), a centralized platform for digital in-store media integration backed by Mood Media, in partnership with Catalyst Media Consulting, a collective of retail media and ad tech executives. Research input came from brand, agency, and retail media network executives across the U.S. and U.K. Quoted contributors include Collin Colburn, VP of Commerce and Retail Media at the IAB, and Paul Brenner, SVP of Global Retail Media and Partnerships at ISM.

What: A research report arguing that the primary barrier to scaling digital in-store advertising is not a measurement technology gap but a measurement alignment gap - four different stakeholder groups evaluating the same activation through four incompatible scorecards. The report introduces the Shopper Purchase Rate (SPR), a framework that measures product movement by shopper segment (loyal, occasional, lapsed, new) using matched-market tests and pre/post analysis, without requiring one-to-one digital attribution.

When: The report was published on April 7, 2026, by ISM and Catalyst Media Consulting.

Where: The research was conducted across the United States and the United Kingdom, drawing on interviews with brand, agency, and retail media network executives. ISM is headquartered in Indianapolis.

Why: Consistent incremental investment from CPG brands in digital in-store media remains limited despite sector growth. The report argues that the industry has been applying digital attribution logic to a channel that operates differently from e-commerce, creating complexity that satisfies media scorecards but not the product-movement metrics that govern CPG budget decisions. The SPR framework is proposed as a common language that aligns merchants, brands, agencies, and retail media networks around a single question: did the activation move more product, and among which shoppers?

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