In-store is the part of retail media that runs inside a physical shop. IAB and IAB Europe fixed the definition in a joint standard published on December 3, 2024: advertising inventory that leverages retail data for planning, execution and measurement within a store's physical environment. The qualifier carries the weight. A cardboard shelf-talker is signage. The same shelf becomes in-store retail media once the retailer's transaction and loyalty data decides what appears there, who is counted as having seen it, and whether the campaign moved product. The category exists because most grocery and general merchandise still leaves the building through a checkout, and retailers that had already learned to monetize their websites went looking for the remaining footfall.

What counts as inventory

The IAB and IAB Europe standard limits its scope to three format families: digital screens, audio, and connected shopping. Other formats, the document states, will be addressed in later iterations. That leaves a working inventory list of endcap and aisle screens, checkout and queue displays, entrance and exterior panels, in-store radio and audio insertions, tablets mounted on smart shopping carts, and digital shelf labels. IAB Europe's broader pan-European definitions, published March 26, 2025, take a wider view, grouping digital screens, audio, connected shopping, printed materials and experiential activations under in-store, alongside separate on-site and off-site categories.

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Placement is described through a five-zone taxonomy: exterior, entrance, checkout, aisles, and other. Zones exist so that a bid request for a screen above a frozen-food case can be distinguished from one for a screen behind a till, and so that traffic counts attached to each can be compared between retailers.

How a campaign reaches a screen

Most in-store media is still sold directly, through insertion orders negotiated between a brand's shopper marketing team and the retailer's media arm. The programmatic route runs on digital out-of-home plumbing rather than on anything purpose-built for retail.

IAB Tech Lab folded out-of-home into OpenRTB, the real-time bidding protocol used across programmatic advertising, in November 2022, working with the Out of Home Advertising Association of America and the United Kingdom trade body Outsmart. The result is a dooh object that sits at the top level of a bid request, mutually exclusive with the site and app objects used for web and mobile inventory. Screens are classified using the venuetax and venuetypeid fields, which point at the OpenOOH Venue Taxonomy, an open specification first published in 2020 and maintained on GitHub. Its Retail parent category carries children including grocery, convenience stores, pharmacies, malls, liquor stores and fueling stations.

Two mechanics separate in-store from a banner impression. First, one ad play is seen by an unknown number of people, so OpenRTB carries a qty object with a multiplier that can be greater or smaller than one. Fractional values such as 0.32 impressions per play are normal, because the number is statistically modeled rather than counted. Media cost is then resolved through the AUCTION_MULTIPLIER macro. Second, screens misbehave in ways browsers do not. IAB Tech Lab's implementation notes list the reasons: most commercial networks sit on private IP addresses, so demand-side platforms cannot infer location and must accept publisher-declared coordinates; connections drop, so some operators buffer playlists in advance and accept a lead time from bid to display of up to two hours; and creative is manually reviewed before it can run, with approval measured in working days, because one offensive advert shown to a queue of shoppers can cost a media owner its venue contract.

On the sell side, a retailer either builds the network or rents one. Grocery TV, which reports partnerships with more than 120 retailers across upwards of 6,700 stores, and In-Store Marketplace, backed by the background-music company Mood Media, both operate as intermediaries for chains that lack their own stack. Broadsign, Vistar Media, VIOOH and Place Exchange supply the transaction layer; Broadsign acquired Place Exchange on November 25, 2025, taking its programmatically transactable footprint to 1.8 million screens.

Counting an audience that cannot be cookied

The measurement standard sets out four progressively stronger claims about the same playout: ad play, a device log event with no audience claim attached; gross impression; opportunity to see; and likelihood to see. The document instructs networks to report ad play and gross impressions today, and to disclose the formulas used. For digital activations, opportunity to see is named the best available proxy for a viewable impression, mapped to the IAB and Media Rating Council retail media measurement guidelines.

Sales measurement is handled separately, with a recommended reporting frame of thirty days before exposure, the campaign period, and thirty days after. The standard defines sales lift, brand sales lift, sales variance, brand variance and incremental sales, and treats test-versus-control designs as the practical method, noting that one-to-one attribution demands substantial technology investment. New to brand and new to category metrics classify shoppers by prior purchase history.

Why the category is being fought over

Retail media as a whole is large and growing quickly. European spending reached 13.7 billion euros in 2024, up 21.1%, with IAB Europe projecting 16.9 billion euros for 2025 and 20.8 billion for 2026. Estimates for the United States market in 2026 cluster around the same figure from different sources: approximately 70 billion dollars according to measurement firm Incremental, and 71.09 billion according to In-Store Marketplace. Omdia research published in September 2025 projected global retail media above 300 billion dollars by 2030, roughly a fifth of all advertising revenue.

In-store is not broken out separately in any of those totals, which is part of why it attracts attention. It is the only retail media surface that reaches shoppers who never touch the retailer's website, and the only one whose audience arrives already holding a basket.

Where it breaks

The unresolved problem is the denominator. Every rung above ad play requires an estimate of how many people were present and facing the screen, and those estimates come from camera sensors, wifi probes, mobile location panels or store traffic counters, each with different error characteristics and none audited to a common rule.

A report published April 7, 2026 by In-Store Marketplace and Catalyst Media Consulting argued that the obstacle is not technical, but that brands, agencies, merchants and retail media networks apply incompatible scorecards to the same campaign. Its proposed alternative, Shopper Purchase Rate, measures product movement by shopper segment through matched-market tests rather than digital attribution.

Closed-loop reporting has its own gap. Analysis of retail media attribution has documented that a shopper exposed at one retailer frequently buys at another, leaving the causal impact uncounted. Grocery TV addressed that specific hole by adding third-party sales lift measurement from ABCS Insights in April 2026, drawing on a panel of 41 million United States households.

Effectiveness research in the category is largely vendor-supplied and should be read as such. Grocery TV's 2026 In-Store Shopper Perception Report, released June 2, 2026, found 62% of 1,018 surveyed United States grocery shoppers had bought a product after seeing it on an in-store screen. The publisher sells the inventory being evaluated.

Adoption is also slower than the announcement volume suggests. IAB Europe's 2025 survey found 70% of buyers naming the absence of retail media standards as an investment barrier, and while 88% of buyers require return on ad spend data, only 71% of networks supply it. The standards document itself concedes it does not apply cleanly to every store format or category.

Terms it is confused with

Digital out-of-home describes screens outside the home generally, classified by venue. In-store is a subset defined by data rather than location: an identical screen is DOOH when bought on venue type and in-store retail media when bought and measured on the retailer's shopper data.

On-site retail media covers sponsored products and display on the retailer's own website and app. Off-site covers retailer data applied to third-party inventory. In-store is the third leg of that taxonomy, not a variant of the first.

Store visits is a Google Ads and Display and Video 360 conversion type that estimates physical visits following an online ad. It measures a journey into the store; in-store measures media running once the shopper is inside.

Shopper marketing and trade promotion are the budget lines in-store media is often funded from, covering displays, coupons and merchandising fees. They are commercial arrangements rather than measured media inventory.

Recent developments

Full-stack technology providers spent 2026 displacing legacy signage systems at national chains. Perion won Best Buy Canada's 308 stores on June 16, 2026, deploying an ad server, supply-side platform and header bidding to convert fixed-loop screens into impression-level inventory, and disclosed two further mandates with its second-quarter results on August 10, 2026: GS Netvision in South Korea, covering more than 3,300 screens, and Lovitlocal in United Kingdom post offices. Broadsign took JB Hi-Fi's 200-plus Australian stores in April 2026.

Regional grocery moved in parallel. In-Store Marketplace launched programmatic audio across 165 Stater Bros. stores on May 5, 2026, screens to follow; Grocery TV added 208 Raley's stores on May 20, 2026, then licensed 3,500 audience attributes from Esri on July 29, 2026. Broadsign and Mirakl Ads announced a partnership on June 24, 2026 to sell e-commerce placements and store screens under one brief.

Timeline

  • 2020: OpenOOH Venue Taxonomy first published, standardizing venue types for programmatic out-of-home
  • November 2022: IAB Tech Lab adds digital out-of-home support to OpenRTB 2.x, with the dooh and qty objects
  • January 2024: IAB and Media Rating Council publish retail media measurement guidelines
  • July 2024: Amazon Ads launches in-store digital signage advertising at Whole Foods Market and Amazon Fresh
  • September 18, 2024: IAB and IAB Europe release first in-store retail media definitions and measurement standards for public comment, open until November 1
  • December 3, 2024: Final In-Store Retail Media Definitions and Measurement Standards published
  • March 26, 2025: IAB Europe publishes updated pan-European retail and commerce media definitions covering on-site, off-site and in-store
  • September 2025: Albert Heijn becomes first network certified under IAB Europe's retail media certification programme
  • November 3, 2025: IAB and IAB Europe publish Guidelines for Incremental Measurement in Commerce Media
  • November 25, 2025: Broadsign acquires Place Exchange
  • April 7, 2026: In-Store Marketplace and Catalyst Media Consulting publish the Shopper Purchase Rate framework
  • February 2026: Out of Home Advertising Association of America releases an updated OpenOOH venue taxonomy
  • June 2, 2026: Grocery TV publishes its 2026 In-Store Shopper Perception Report
  • August 10, 2026: Perion discloses in-store mandates in South Korea and the United Kingdom

Summary

Who: Retailers operating physical stores, the retail media networks they run or outsource, technology suppliers including Grocery TV, In-Store Marketplace, Broadsign, Perion, Vistar Media and VIOOH, and the consumer goods brands and agencies buying the inventory. Standards are set jointly by IAB, IAB Europe, the Media Rating Council and, for venue classification, the Out of Home Advertising Association of America.

What: Advertising inventory inside a store that uses retail data for planning, execution and measurement, scoped by the current standard to digital screens, audio and connected shopping formats, placed across five store zones and traded either directly or programmatically through the OpenRTB dooh object.

When: Point-of-purchase advertising is old, but the standardized programmatic form dates from November 2022, when out-of-home entered OpenRTB, and December 3, 2024, when IAB and IAB Europe published final in-store definitions and measurement standards.

Where: Grocery, convenience, pharmacy, electronics and general merchandise chains worldwide, with the most documented activity in the United States, Europe and Australia.

Why: The physical store is where most retail sales still happen and where a shopper is closest to the decision. Standardization exists to let brands compare in-store inventory against television and out-of-home on common metrics, and the open dispute is whether current audience and sales measurement is credible enough to justify the shift.