IAB Australia today published the retailer panel recording from its Commerce & Retail Media Summit, held in Sydney on July 7, 2026, in which executives from Metcash, MixIn and TerryWhite Chemmart argued that a narrowing focus on incremental sales is shrinking the commercial ceiling of Australian retail media networks.

The recording, posted to the IAB Australia YouTube channel today, captures a 35-minute session titled "Retailer Panel: Key Findings from the State of the Nation Report." The panel featured Janice Hoogeveen, General Manager, Marketing & Retail Media at TerryWhite Chemmart; Hayley Robinson, Head of Retail Media Sales & GTM at MixIn; and Mark Lollback, GM of LocalEyes Retail Media at Metcash. Gai Le Roy, CEO of IAB Australia, moderated.

The summit itself ran from 12.30pm to 5.00pm at the NSW Teachers Federation Conference Centre in Surry Hills. According to IAB Australia, Natalie Stanbury, the organisation's Director of Research, opened proceedings with two research releases: a consumer-facing Commerce Report and the trade-facing Commerce & Retail Media State of the Nation. Later sessions on the same programme featured speakers from Amazon, Criteo, Vudoo, Uber, Epsilon, Microsoft, Galderma and Arnotts.

The case against a single metric

Lollback, who spent most of his career on the client side as a chief marketing officer before moving into retail media, used the panel to press a structural objection. Asked whether the sector was getting closer to delivering the media metrics that brand budgets demand, he answered that it was, then immediately qualified the point.

"I think there's a real there's a real challenge and opportunity here. We're going to get really narrow and we're going to become a performance-based measurement-based incrementality solution and I think that's crazy," he said. "I think that's going to end up in a really narrow small hole and it's not going to serve our suppliers well."

His comparison was blunt. "I don't know any other media form in this country that the only focus is on incrementality," Lollback said. The consequence, in his account, is that retail media prices itself as a trading lever rather than as media, and forfeits the budgets that sit above the category line.

Lollback proposed replacing what he described as a linear transaction between the retailer's merchandise team and the supplier's category team with a wider negotiating structure. "In my mind, we have to move to like a quadrangle model. Everybody has to be in the room," he said, listing merchandise, category, retail media, brand, shopper marketing and agency participants. The purpose of the wider room, he argued, is to start with the communication objective rather than the measurement method. "Not all of it is incremental sales."

Pressed later by an audience member on what metric should replace incrementality, Lollback declined to name one. "What's the objective? And then have the appropriate measurement," he said. If the challenge is category penetration, penetration should be the measure; if the product is new, trial should be. "It's got to be a meaningful measure not measuring because it's easy to do."

He drew a line between business-as-usual trading activity, where hard commercial measurement belongs, and campaigns addressing awareness, penetration or new product launches, where he said the industry has allowed measurement convenience to determine ambition.

Metcash: four pillars, 800 screens

The Metcash retail media business has changed shape faster than the argument around it. Lollback said the network was born out of grocery but now operates daily across all four of the group's pillars: grocery, liquor, hardware and tools. Media specialists have been embedded inside each pillar rather than held centrally, a deliberate move away from what he called a corporate function.

The audience data behind that structure is unusual for an Australian retail media network. According to Lollback, roughly 60% of Mitre 10 sales come through trades, with the remainder from do-it-yourself customers. At Total Tools, 85% of sales come from professional trades. Those figures matter commercially because the tradie audience is difficult to reach through conventional media buying, and Metcash holds loyalty databases and store assets addressing it directly.

That has produced cross-pillar campaigns from advertisers with no obvious hardware connection. Lollback cited a recent KitKat campaign that ran across grocery, liquor and hardware, and an unnamed car brand that bought the network specifically to reach tradespeople. He also described a summer campaign for Coca-Cola built around a creative challenge rather than a price mechanic: six weeks, six separate creative executions, in-store activation, and a measurement conversation focused on penetration objectives rather than incrementality.

The network's physical footprint runs to more than 800 screens across regional, metropolitan and suburban Australia, addressable down to the individual screen. Lollback said clients have brought geographic problems to the business rather than category problems, naming Queensland and a section of the Melbourne central business district as examples.

Scarcity is the argument he attached to that inventory. "We've only got so many slots you can sell on a digital screen per week," he said, arguing that peak trading windows such as end of financial year and Mother's Day should be valued the way finals fixtures are valued in sport, because availability is finite and demand is concentrated.

Metcash also announced a strategic partnership with Nine Entertainment and QMS shortly before the summit, extending the network's reach outside the store environment. Lollback framed the deal as connecting a consumer watching television, then passing outdoor inventory, then activating in store.

MixIn: clean rooms and a reporting reset

Robinson leads sales for MixIn, the retail media business of Endeavour Group, covering Dan Murphy's, BWS and ALH Hotels. She described a business that has moved from the periphery to the centre of its parent company's growth narrative. "We've definitely evolved as a retail media network from a sort of tactical network that sort of sat there to a fully embedded uh growth engine for the business," she said, noting recognition at a recent investor day.

The structural change was organisational. MixIn launched inside the merchandise team, which Robinson described as unusual for a retail media network, and has since moved into a newly formed customer team aligned with marketing. The sequence, she argued, left the business with merchandise relationships intact while gaining marketing proximity.

The measurement work sits in a clean room partnership. "I see the clean room partnership that we've got as sitting at the heart of how we grow in F27 and beyond," Robinson said, describing it as the first time the group's first-party data will be accessible for planning, execution and measurement. "It means that the data doesn't need to leave the walls of our retail environment and we protect our um customer privacy first and foremost."

That approach mirrors infrastructure decisions taken elsewhere in the sector, including LiveRamp's extension of clean room measurement to Meta campaigns for networks such as Albertsons Media Collective and Roundel in October 2025, and the broader move to treat first-party data as an enterprise asset that IAB Europe documented in its 2026 retail media guide.

Robinson said supplier sophistication varies enough that a single reporting product does not work. Some partners have doubled down on marketing mix modelling, which she noted was not built to measure retail media; others still find standard post-campaign reports valuable. MixIn is rolling out standardised reporting in the first quarter of the new financial year with benchmarking, omnichannel coverage and attribution windows aligned across channels. Larger strategic partners get bespoke measurement. "A one-size-fits-all approach doesn't work," she said.

She also pushed back on the assumption that liquor sales are guaranteed. Younger consumers are drinking differently, she said, which removes the premise that the transaction would have happened anyway and creates a job for upper-funnel activity. The example she gave was a Formula 1 activation with Jim Beam and Suntory, where the trade team recorded commercial results while the brand team recorded delivery against a sponsorship objective.

TerryWhite Chemmart: measuring conversations

Hoogeveen's network is two years old and operates on a different clock. TerryWhite Chemmart runs 17 three-week trading cycles per year, with roughly 20 suppliers investing in media across each campaign. The media sales team reached two people the day before the summit. The loyalty database holds three million members.

Her account of the past year centred on internal credibility rather than external demand. The biggest shift, she said, has been building trust and transparency inside the business, with the merchandise team initially uncertain about how much a retail media operation would encroach on category economics. Campaign reporting has been substantially upweighted as part of that work.

Pharmacy also breaks the standard measurement template. Customers arrive to solve a health problem, often a chronic condition, and the store contains a dedicated care clinic staffed by a pharmacist. For healthcare professional brands constrained by advertising regulation, Hoogeveen said the network looks at different measures entirely: the conversations a pharmacist is able to have, awareness of a condition, the ability to discuss comorbidities. "The idea of measurement becomes quite different when you're thinking about solving a health problem," she said.

The network tracks Net Promoter Score across its loyalty database and runs annual trust tracking. As a franchise network, it applies internal review to in-store screen messaging, with Hoogeveen noting extended internal discussion about whether particular messages are appropriate for a pharmacy environment.

She was also the panellist who raised creative effectiveness. Marketers running above-the-line campaigns have long used emotional creative testing systems, she said, adding that she is "not seeing that so much in retail media" and inviting the sector to treat creative as a measurable variable.

Standardisation against differentiation

Le Roy asked where the line sits between infrastructure standardisation and preserving what distinguishes individual networks. Lollback's answer was the sharpest commercial statement in the session. "My really big concern is standardization if we're not careful would just make us a commodity and then it'll be a race to the bottom. We'll be back to measuring CPMs and all that sort of stuff."

His alternative is differentiation through shopper composition rather than through ad specifications. Communities in regional Australia and major cities represent different customer groups, he argued, and the network's value proposition is the quality and uniqueness of those shoppers rather than the interchangeability of its inventory.

He also flagged an execution problem that standardisation alone does not solve. Retail media, he said, is not a single asset. "We're not a one asset pony." Assets now span electronic direct mail, in-store screens, radio, catalogues, outdoor, television and LinkedIn, with no settled method for combining them into a single account of performance.

Le Roy surfaced a disconnect from the State of the Nation survey data. Retailers hear consistently that buyers want more data. The buy side, she said, is asking for more insights. Both Hoogeveen and Lollback aligned with the second framing. Lollback said he would rather see network data used to extract shopper-level and category-level insight for partners than deployed purely as measurement input.

On automation, Robinson said MixIn is now included in store format design conversations, which allows it to specify uniform retail media spaces rather than working around varied dimensions across Dan Murphy's stores. The operational payoff is a single set of creative specifications for trade partners. Hoogeveen said her business is about to announce a partnership intended to help on the same problem, alongside an internal creative team.

Why this matters for marketers

The panel arrives with Australian retail media growing faster than the market it is drawing budget from. Analysis presented at the 2025 edition of the same summit benchmarked Australian retail media spending to rise from $650 million in 2025 to $3 billion by 2027, roughly three times the pace of the United States market. IAB Australia's Wave 3 research the same year found 79% of existing retail media advertisers planning to increase spending, with proximity to the point of purchase the leading investment driver for a second consecutive year.

Satisfaction has not tracked that growth. Research presented at the July 2025 summit recorded agency satisfaction with retail media networks falling from 66% to 44% while budgets rose about 20%. The measurement debate on the 2025 panel, featuring Coles 360, Circana and Google, identified omnichannel attribution complexity as the central unresolved problem. A separate 2025 session addressed the risk of networks simply reallocating trade dollars rather than attracting incremental investment.

Lollback's objection runs against a wider standardisation programme. IAB Australia published its own retail media measurement principles in August 2024, covering SKU and halo attribution, ROAS and incremental ROAS. The IAB followed with an incrementality framework for commerce media budgets in 2025, and argued in April 2026 that legacy marketing mix models systematically undervalue retail media compared with closed-loop causal measurement. IAB Europe opened public comment on updated commerce media measurement standards in October 2025.

The tension the panel exposed is not whether causal measurement is accurate. It is what happens to pricing power when a channel is assessed exclusively on the metric that is easiest to compute. Research on in-store measurement published in April 2026 found that brand, trade, merchant and network teams apply different scorecards to the same activation and reach contradictory verdicts. Analysis published in June 2026 concluded that siloed last-touch attribution understates upper-funnel retail media returns by a factor of three to five in some cases, and that the majority of retail media spending is now funded from brand and media budgets rather than trade funds.

For advertisers, the practical implication of the Australian panel is that three networks with very different asset bases are converging on the same negotiating position: measurement should follow the objective, and objectives set by category teams alone will not unlock the budgets sitting with brand teams. For networks, the risk Lollback named is specific. Uniform specifications and a single dominant metric make inventory comparable, and comparable inventory competes on price.

Timeline

  • August 28, 2024 - IAB Australia publishes Australian Retail Media Measurement Principles and Guidance, covering SKU and halo attribution, ROAS, iROAS and lookback windows (PPC Land)
  • July 29, 2025 - IAB Australia releases Wave 3 Retail Media State of the Nation, with 79% of existing advertisers planning increased spend (PPC Land)
  • July 29, 2025 - Summit analysis benchmarks Australian retail media to grow from $650 million to $3 billion by 2027 (PPC Land)
  • July 29, 2025 - Agency satisfaction with retail media networks falls from 66% to 44% as budgets rise about 20% (PPC Land)
  • October 9, 2025 - IAB Europe opens public comment on Commerce Media Measurement Standards V2 and flexible ad size guidelines (PPC Land)
  • October 23, 2025 - LiveRamp extends clean room measurement to Meta campaigns for retail media networks (PPC Land)
  • April 9, 2026 - IAB white paper argues marketing mix modelling structurally undervalues retail media (PPC Land)
  • April 10, 2026 - Research finds brand, trade, merchant and network teams score the same in-store activation differently (PPC Land)
  • June 15, 2026 - Analysis concludes siloed attribution understates upper-funnel retail media returns by three to five times in some cases (PPC Land)
  • Late June 2026 - Metcash announces strategic partnership with Nine Entertainment and QMS
  • July 7, 2026 - IAB Australia Commerce & Retail Media Summit runs in Surry Hills, Sydney, with the retailer panel featuring TerryWhite Chemmart, MixIn and Metcash
  • July 27, 2026 - TerryWhite Chemmart adds a second media salesperson, per Hoogeveen's remark that the hire took effect the previous day
  • July 28, 2026 - IAB Australia publishes the retailer panel recording to its YouTube channel

Summary

Who: Janice Hoogeveen, General Manager, Marketing & Retail Media at TerryWhite Chemmart; Hayley Robinson, Head of Retail Media Sales & GTM at MixIn, the retail media business of Endeavour Group; and Mark Lollback, GM of LocalEyes Retail Media at Metcash, in a session moderated by IAB Australia CEO Gai Le Roy.

What: A retailer panel on the findings of IAB Australia's Commerce & Retail Media State of the Nation report, in which the panellists argued that measuring retail media primarily on incremental sales limits the channel's access to brand budgets. Disclosed operating detail included more than 800 Metcash screens, 85% of Total Tools sales from professional trades, roughly 60% of Mitre 10 sales from trades, 17 three-week trading cycles a year at TerryWhite Chemmart with about 20 media investors per cycle, and a three million member loyalty database.

When: The summit took place on July 7, 2026, from 12.30pm to 5.00pm. IAB Australia published the panel recording on July 28, 2026.

Where: NSW Teachers Federation Conference Centre, Surry Hills, Sydney, Australia.

Why: Australian retail media is growing faster than the wider advertising market while agency satisfaction with networks has declined, and the sector is simultaneously pursuing standardisation of measurement and creative specifications. The panellists argued that a single dominant metric and uniform specifications risk turning differentiated retail inventory into a commodity priced on cost per thousand impressions, and that objectives such as penetration, trial and awareness require measurement chosen to match the brief.