Fewer than half of European retail media buyers now ask their networks for return on ad spend, down from 89% a year earlier, according to IAB Europe's Attitudes to Retail Media Report 2026, published on November 3, 2026 in Brussels. The metric that topped buyers' wish list in 2025 has fallen to 49% and out of the top four, replaced by unified online and offline reporting at 66%, new-to-brand and new-to-category measurement at 63%, and incrementality at 57%. The third edition of the study also finds that 71% of European buyers have now partnered with retailers for more than a year, up from 51% in 2024, while only 12% of buyers describe their retail media strategy as fully sophisticated.

In Short

Europe's main online advertising trade body asked 150 advertisers, agencies and retailers how they buy and sell ads on shop websites, apps and in-store screens. Buyers are sticking with retail media for longer, but most now want proof that the ads brought in new customers and sales that would not have happened anyway, and far fewer just want a simple return-on-spend number. Retailers still mostly hand over the simpler reports, so the coming year will show whether they build the measurement buyers say they want.

150 respondents, and the first MENA sample

The study draws on 150 respondents: 91 on the buy side, meaning advertisers and agencies, and 59 on the sell side, meaning retailers, media owners and retail media networks. According to IAB Europe, the survey collected 303 raw records, which were reduced to 150 after removing screener drop-outs and four records that SurveyMonkey's Response Quality system flagged as poor quality. Caras Consulting carried out the quantitative analysis. Ascentinel ran 18 independent qualitative interviews, 11 with buyers and seven with sellers, with LuckyCart and Mirakl Ads sponsoring that qualitative work. The report was developed by IAB Europe's Retail & Commerce Media Committee, which is chaired by Jason Wescott, Global Head of Commerce Solutions at WPP Media.

For the first time, the research includes what IAB Europe calls a meaningful sample from the Middle East and North Africa. The analytical bases are Europe at 110 and MENA at 37, and the two overlap: 11 European respondents also hold MENA responsibility, so the regions cannot be added together, according to the report.

The headline year-on-year figures rest on much smaller numbers. Every trended comparison uses European buy-side respondents only, with bases of 34 to 42 in 2026: the partnership figure of 71% sits on 42 buyers, the ROAS figure of 49% on 35. IAB Europe marks a movement as significant when a two-proportion z-test clears 95% confidence and flags any cut with a base under 30 as indicative.

There is also a quiet revision of the earlier editions. The report states that prior waves were cleaned "on the same structural rule," which leaves 134 respondents in 2024 and 135 in 2025. When IAB Europe released the second edition on July 15, 2025, 180 respondents across 31 markets had taken part, and 50% of buyers had partnered with retailers for more than a year in 2024, rising to 63% in 2025. The re-cleaned series in the 2026 report reads 51% and 64%. The 2025 ROAS demand figure moves from the 88% published at the time to 89%. Data availability as a barrier moves from 40% and 29% in the published 2024 and 2025 results to 45% and 31% in the re-cleaned series. The differences are small, but they mean the 2026 report's trend lines cannot be laid directly over the numbers published in earlier years.

The report does not state when fieldwork took place or how many countries respondents came from. The 2025 survey ran from April to June 2025. The 2026 edition arrives almost 16 months after its predecessor, in November rather than July.

Partnerships lengthen, sophistication does not

Partnership length is the clearest trend in the study, according to IAB Europe. Among European buyers, the share partnering with retailers for more than a year rose from 51% in 2024 to 64% in 2025 and 71% in 2026. The 21-point gain between 2024 and 2026 is significant (p=0.039). The report calculates point changes on unrounded figures, which is why it describes the move as 21 points rather than 20.

Across all buyers, including MENA, 70% have partnered for more than a year and 13% not at all (n=53); of those not yet partnering, 72% plan to start within 12 months. On the sell side, 69% have had a retail media offer for more than a year and 16% have none (n=58); of those without one, 38% plan to launch within 12 months.

The report gives those two follow-up questions bases of 32 buyers and 21 sellers. Thirteen percent of 53 buyers is about seven people, and 16% of 58 sellers is about nine, so the follow-up bases are larger than the groups they are described as covering. The report does not explain the difference.

Commitment has not turned into maturity. On a five-point scale, 43% of buyers place themselves at level 3, Established, which IAB Europe defines as investing across several retailers and ad types with regular performance reviews. Some 24% sit at level 4, Advanced, 17% at level 2, Developing, and 5% at level 1, Basic. Only 12% reach level 5, Sophisticated, where strategy, channels, formats, data, tools and measurement are fully integrated. The mean score is 3.2 out of 5 (n=42). In the 2025 edition, 13% of buyers placed themselves at the highest maturity level, which puts the 2026 figure roughly where it was a year earlier.

Formal evaluation is spreading: 69% of buyers now have frameworks or evaluation metrics for partnerships, and on the European base the share has risen from 60% in 2024 to 69%, though the gain is not significant.

Buyers work with many networks at once. According to the report, 63% of buyers work with four or more retail media networks and 18% with ten or more (n=49).

"Nobody in this study is questioning whether retail media works," Wescott writes in the report's foreword. "They are questioning whether they can prove it."

ROAS loses its place at the top

The change in what buyers want from measurement is the sharpest single-year movement in the dataset, according to IAB Europe. Among European buyers, the share asking networks for return on ad spend went from 76% in 2024 to 89% in 2025, then fell to 49% in 2026. The fall is significant at 99.9% (p<0.001), and the report says every other retained option in the question moved within statistical noise.

The 2026 version of the question added options, which dilutes each option's share, and the report concedes the fall "may partly reflect the longer list," though no other retained option moved significantly.

According to the report, ROAS "is an efficiency ratio" that "counts sales that would often have happened anyway." The metrics that now rank above it ask different questions: whether a campaign brought in customers new to the brand or category, and whether it produced sales that would not otherwise have happened. Why the reversal after a year in which ROAS demand had risen? The report reads it as "a maturity signal, and a warning to sellers."

Across all buyers including MENA (n=40), unified online and offline reporting leads at 68%, followed by new to brand or new to category at 63%, incrementality at 58%, ROAS at 55%, and unified on-site and off-site reporting and category versus product-level reporting at 50% each. Cross-product attribution reaches 45%, basket-level and campaign metrics 43% each, brand metrics 33% and attribution for proprietary models 20%. ROAS reads 55% on this broader base, which includes MENA buyers, against 49% on the European base.

The qualitative interviews suggest the metric is being demoted rather than dropped. "ROAS is still important, but we need metrics on top of this like, repeat customers, lifetime value," one agency buyer told Ascentinel. A retailer described the market as "wedded to ROAS which is a unifying metric that is established," adding that "incremental ROAS, i.e. sales uplift is much harder to track but arguably of greater value."

A year ago, the gap ran the other way. When the 2025 edition was released, 88% of buyers demanded ROAS measurement while 71% of networks provided consistent ROAS reporting, and the shortfall in supply was the story. In 2026, 73% of sellers offer ROAS. The report's verdict on that is direct: "Sellers who lead their pitch on ROAS are answering last year's question, and 73% of them still offer it."

What buyers want against what sellers supply

The report sets the buyer list against what sellers say they currently offer (n=45). Sellers lead with campaign metrics such as reach and frequency at 76%, and ROAS and media metrics such as impressions and viewability at 73% each. Unified online and offline reporting is offered by 40%, unified on-site and off-site reporting by 31% and cross-product attribution by 24%.

Demand runs ahead of supply on unified online and offline reporting, 68% against 40%, and on cross-product attribution, 45% against 24%. Supply runs ahead on campaign metrics, 76% against 43%, and ROAS, 73% against 55%. "What sellers supply well tells advertisers how a campaign ran, not whether it grew the business," the report states.

These gaps are not significance-tested. Buyers ticked more options on average, 5.3 against 4.7, and the two lists differ: new-to-brand and incrementality are not on the seller list at all, and media metrics is not on the buyer list. IAB Europe says the gaps should be read for direction rather than exact size.

Multi-touch attribution: the tested gap

One comparison does clear the bar. Asked which attribution model they would ideally want, 58% of buyers chose multi-touch attribution, 28% single-touch and 11% none of the above (n=36). On the sell side, 45% offer single-touch, 31% offer multi-touch and 21% offer none of these models (n=42). The 27-point gap between buyer demand and seller supply of multi-touch attribution is significant at 95% (p=0.015).

The share of sellers offering no attribution model is almost double the share of buyers who want none, though that particular gap is not significant on these bases. The report links it to the 32% of buyers who name lack of attribution as a barrier to investment.

Both attribution questions are new in 2026, so no year-on-year comparison is possible. IAB Europe's announcement headlines a "growing gap between buyer expectations and measurement capabilities." The study shows buyer expectations moving sharply. It does not measure whether the supply side has fallen further behind, because the sharpest version of the gap was asked for the first time this year.

Not one seller prices on CPA

Pricing models point the same way. Asked for their top two pricing strategies (n=59), 69% of sellers name CPM, 42% CPC, 25% flat fee and 19% auction-based pricing. None names cost per acquisition. The report notes the absence of CPA "in a channel sold on its proximity to the sale."

Barriers: data availability surges, measurement leads a tight pack

Among European buyers, lack of measurement and reporting is now the most cited barrier to further investment at 61%, up from 48% in 2025 and 52% in 2024. Lack of available data rose from 31% to 58% in a single year, a 27-point increase that is significant (p=0.013). The 13-point rise in measurement is directional, not significant, according to the report's own appendix. IAB Europe argues both rises are, if anything, understated, because the 2026 barrier list added options and "adding options normally pulls every existing option's share down."

The two other infrastructure barriers in the tracked set moved in a different pattern. Lack of standardisation stands at 56% in 2026, against 52% in 2025 and 66% in 2024. Fragmentation of retail media networks is also at 56%, against 50% in 2025 and 68% in 2024. Both were the most cited of the four in 2024, and both remain below their 2024 levels.

On the full buyer base (n=41), the ranking is less clear-cut than the announcement suggests. IAB Europe's release states that "measurement remains the biggest barrier to investment." The report itself says lack of measurement and reporting heads the list at 61%, but the next three sit at 59%, 59% and 56%, and "on a base of 41 that spread is inside the margin of error, so the honest reading is a tightly bunched group of four infrastructure barriers rather than one clear winner."

Further down the list, cost of partnering reaches 49%, lack of technology 46%, networks not integrated with other technology 41% and lack of attribution 32%. Brand safety or suitability and restrictive click-out policies sit at 10% each.

Buyers who named lack of standardisation were asked where it is needed most (n=33). Attribution measurement was named by 79% and media measurement by 73%, almost twice the rate of creative standards and ad formats at 42%. Data strategies followed at 33%, third-party campaign verification at 30% and campaign capability and process at 27%.

From the shelf to the data

The reasons buyers give for investing are shifting too. On an option list that has stayed identical across all three waves, European buyers citing the chance to reach shoppers at the point of sale fell from 82% in 2025 to 62% in 2026, a significant 20-point drop (p=0.038). It had stood at 75% in 2024.

Access to retailer first-party data remains the dominant reason at 81%, but has eased from 91% in 2024 and 84% in 2025. Closed-loop attribution has slipped from 64% to 50% to 46%. Neither of those two declines is significant, though both are consistent in direction across all three waves; the report calls them "likely real but under-powered at these bases."

Across all buyers (n=42), first-party data access leads at 83%, followed by reaching shoppers at the point of sale at 57%, closed-loop attribution at 50% and greater media efficiency from deterministic retailer data at 45%. Post-third-party-cookie strategy draws 24% and access to privacy-compliant advertising 14%. First-party data is the only reason named by more than two-thirds of buyers, and it leads the second option by 26 points.

IAB Europe reads this as buyers valuing retail media "as an audience and data asset they can use across their wider marketing, not simply as a shopper-marketing tactic at the shelf." The report draws a direct line from that shift to the measurement problem: "Buyers are moving the justification for retail media up the funnel, and the measurement available to them has not moved with it."

Where the money comes from

Investment is still rising. Some 73% of buyers increased their retail media investment over the past 12 months, 16% held it steady, 8% cut it and 4% were not sure (n=51). Satisfaction is net positive: 49% are more satisfied with retail media than with other media investments, 24% less satisfied, 18% about the same and 10% not sure.

Retail media remains a modest share of most digital budgets: 38% of buyers put it at 1% to 10% of digital investment, 22% above 10%, and 28% cannot say (n=50).

Most of the money is moved rather than new. On a multi-select question (n=51), 39% say retail media spend is partly reallocated and partly new, 29% say it is wholly reallocated and 22% say it comes solely from new budgets; 18% do not know and 10% are not yet spending. Half of the buyers who reallocate take the money from brand advertising budgets, 36% from trade, 31% from performance and 31% from social (n=42).

Among European buyers, the brand share has eased from 60% in 2024 and 61% in 2025 to 47% in 2026, though the 13-point fall is not significant and the 2024 base of 25 is below the report's own threshold. IAB Europe draws a consequence from the brand-funding pattern regardless: "If retail media is largely funded by cannibalising brand, it inherits an obligation brand budgets carry: evidence of longer-term, incremental effect rather than last-click sales."

Of buyers reallocating, the channels most often drawn down are display at 49%, traditional channels including radio at 43%, linear TV at 38% and programmatic at 35% (n=37). In the 2025 edition, display was already the primary source of reallocated funds at 55%, on a different base.

"Definitely see it with year-on-year figures, it's just money moving around rather than the pot growing," an agency buyer said in the qualitative interviews. An advertiser put it more bluntly: "Trade marketing is pretty much defined and established and also those budgets aren't growing. So the brand pot is key and agencies are the key aggregate holders."

Dedicated teams on both sides

A separate retail media buying team is now the most common buy-side structure at 38%, ahead of integration into the digital media team at 31% (n=42). Among European buyers, standalone teams have risen from 24% in 2024 to 32% in 2026, while integration into digital teams peaked at 43% in 2025 before falling to 29%; neither movement is significant.

On the sell side, 65% now run a separate retail media sales team rather than folding the function into trade sales (n=40). That compares with 58% in 2025 and 36% in 2024, though those earlier figures come from the published toplines rather than the re-cleaned series.

Formats: on-site, off-site and in-store

On-site supply and demand are closely matched, according to the report. Display ads are bought by 90% of buyers and offered by 87% of sellers. Display video ads reach 63% and 62%, and branded experiences 48% and 42%. The one visible gap is sponsored product and search ads: 88% of buyers invest in them, but only 71% of sellers offer them. Native ads and editorial integrations reach 29% of buyers but were not an option on the seller question.

Off-site, 77% of buyers invest in display against 61% of sellers offering it. Social ads are bought by 58% and offered by 61%, and digital out-of-home by 40% and 41%. Connected TV is bought by 40% of buyers but offered by only 30% of sellers. One in five buyers, 21%, invest in no off-site channel. In the 2025 edition, 19% of retailers enabled CTV placements, which suggests CTV supply has grown even as it trails demand; the questions and bases differ, so the comparison is indicative.

In-store, digital screens dominate: half of buyers name screens as their in-store format and 64% of sellers offer them. Some 20% of buyers invest in no digital in-store format, and 16% do not know what their business invests in. The buyer question ran as single choice in 2026 after being multi-select in 2024 and 2025, so the two sides are not like-for-like.

Just over half of sellers, 51%, now offer on-site, off-site and digital in-store together (n=45). Grocery accounts for half of the sell-side sample, with multi-category retailers or marketplaces next at 34% (n=58).

The sell side: revenue first, measurement third

Sellers build retail media businesses for revenue. Additional revenue is cited by 86% as a driver for investing, ahead of better partnerships with brands at 58%, strategic objectives at 56% and competitive advantage at 50%; incremental demand from advertisers comes fifth at 47% (n=36).

Their barriers are commercial and internal rather than technical. Investment and costs lead at 51% and internal sign-off at 43%, while operational elements including measurement come third at 34% (n=35). The measurement and data problems that dominate the buy side rank behind cost and sign-off for sellers.

Seller expectations for growth have narrowed. First-party data activation still leads as the area sellers expect to drive growth, but has eased from 49% in 2025 to 34% in 2026, and attribution and closed-loop measurement has fallen from 13% to 5%. Incrementality sales measurement, up from 23% to 26%, and reporting dashboards, up from 19% to 24%, are the only two areas sellers rate more highly than a year ago. The option list grew from seven to ten, and IAB Europe labels the comparison indicative and untested.

The more encouraging finding, from IAB Europe's perspective, is in development plans. Enhancing the measurement offer is the sell side's most-cited priority for the next 12 months at 63%, with developing AI capabilities and expanding ad products at 58% each and adopting industry measurement standards at 45% (n=40).

How buyers judge a network

Reporting and transparency is the top criterion buyers use to select a retail media network, named by 86%, followed by measurement options at 70%, performance at 68% and audience reach at 66% (n=44). CPMs come sixth at 43%. Meeting industry standards sits at 36%, and data clean room availability at 30%.

"Networks are being selected on whether they can evidence what they did, not on what they cost," the report concludes. In 2025, transparency and reporting was named by 82% of buyers, though the 2026 option list expanded and the report does not trend the question.

Asked what will drive growth over the next 12 months (n=39), buyers put incrementality sales measurement first at 62%, ahead of standardisation at 56%, omnichannel integration at 46% and reporting dashboards at 44%, with development of AI or agentic capabilities at 36%. The "select the top two" cap used in previous years was not applied in 2026, so buyers chose four options on average and every percentage is inflated; the ranking holds, IAB Europe says, but the values cannot be compared with earlier waves. In 2025, incrementality ranked third behind first-party data activation and omnichannel integration.

AI: build plans, without a measurement standard

AI was asked about for the first time this year. Some 68% of sellers plan to develop AI-powered campaign management and optimisation in the next 12 months, 50% AI-driven creative generation and 50% capabilities for agentic commerce and conversational AI discovery (n=40). Only 13%, about one in eight, are not looking to develop AI at all.

The agentic question asked directly about product visibility inside large language models such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity. Half of sellers plan to build for it.

Buyers were asked to pick the single area they expect to drive the biggest increase in investment (n=41). They split evenly: 39% chose AI-powered campaign management and optimisation, 39% agentic commerce or conversational AI discovery, and 22% AI-driven creative generation. On the European buyer base alone, agentic and conversational AI reads 33% (n=36). Because sellers could select every capability and buyers only one, the report says the two sets of numbers cannot be compared directly.

IAB Europe is explicit about what the AI section does not show. "This study measures industry expectation and build plans, not consumer behaviour," the report states. "The shift is an industry bet, not a measured change in how people shop."

It is equally explicit about the measurement consequence. Retail media measurement depends on observing a shopper's path through a retailer's own website and apps. "If part of that path moves into a third party's model output, there is no agreed way to see it, attribute it, or verify it independently," according to the report. "That standard does not exist yet, and it is being built around rather than being built."

The AI findings echo IAB Europe's separate research. Its 2026 Impact of AI on Digital Advertising Report, published at DMEXCO in September, found that 58% of respondents expect agentic ad buying to reach operational use or scale within a year, on a sample of 50.

Standards as the answer, and what they leave out

IAB Europe presents its own work as the response. "This year's findings show just how firmly Retail Media is becoming embedded in advertising strategies, but there's still work to do to build buyer confidence," said Marie-Clare Puffett, Senior Director, Industry Development & Marketing at IAB Europe. "Through our Commerce Media Measurement Standards and Retail Media Certification Programme, we're helping the industry address these challenges and deliver greater consistency, transparency and accountability."

Wescott's foreword goes further: "We encourage every network to adopt the standards and seek certification, and every buyer to ask for it." In the announcement, he added: "Our report shows partnerships are deepening, but sophistication is lagging. Buyers are outgrowing ROAS - they want incrementality and unified proof of performance. With AI's foot firmly in the door, retailers who crack advanced measurement stand to win the lion's share of budgets."

Certification has reached three companies in two years. The programme launched in October 2024 and requires at least 90% compliance with the framework. Albert Heijn became the first certified retail media network on September 24, 2025, after a pilot audit. Nectar360 followed on July 1, 2026, and on October 7, 2026, at IAB Europe's Retail Media Impact Summit in Amsterdam, Moloco became the first technology provider to complete the programme, making it the third certified company, with five others under audit at the time.

The report itself is candid about the limits of the standards. "IAB Europe's standards already define incrementality, new-to-brand and ROAS, with certification to prove compliance," it states. "But incrementality is optional for certification, and buyers' top ask, unified online and offline reporting, sits outside the standards, as do multi-touch attribution and AI discovery. No single network can close these gaps alone." Of the four metrics buyers rank highest, then, the standards define three, but the first of them, unified online and offline reporting, sits outside; incrementality is optional for certification; and the one gap the report tests statistically, multi-touch attribution, is outside the standards' scope. Does certification answer the demand buyers are now expressing? On IAB Europe's own account, only in part.

Uptake is the other constraint. Only 45% of sellers plan to adopt industry measurement standards in the next 12 months, and only 36% of buyers count meeting industry standards among their criteria for choosing a network. Interviewees were sceptical. "IAB are banging the drum and building out the standards, but driving the take up is more challenging," one advertiser said. A retailer was blunter: "I don't think they [the standards] have cut through. Lots of effort but getting real unification and engagement across the industry is yet to happen." An agency buyer added that "the big players will really drive and define standards."

The standards work continues. IAB Europe opened Version 2 of its Commerce Media Measurement Standards for public comment on October 9, 2025, and on September 17, 2026 it opened Version 2 of its in-store retail media standards alongside a Travel Media Measurement addendum, both with comments closing on October 23, 2026.

Europe and MENA: hypotheses, not findings

The MENA section comes with heavy caveats. Most bases fall between nine and 20 per question, and IAB Europe labels everything in it as hypotheses. MENA bases on the attitudinal comparisons run from 10 to 15.

On those numbers, MENA buyers look more bullish. Some 80% increased retail media investment against 71% of European buyers; 67% are more satisfied with results against 45%; 91% name retailer first-party data as an opportunity against 81%; 73% cite lack of measurement as a barrier against 61%; and 40% expect agentic or conversational AI to drive the biggest investment increase, against 33%.

The respondent profile may explain much of that, according to the report. MENA respondents are more likely to hold regional remits, 61% against 36% in Europe, and MENA buyers are more likely to control large budgets and to put more than 81% of investment into digital, 25% against 14%. "Before concluding that MENA is a different market, it is worth asking whether it is simply a different kind of respondent," the report states.

Method notes

Beyond the base sizes, the report flags questionnaire issues of its own: the growth-drivers cap was dropped, the in-store buyer question switched to single choice, three questions changed their option lists, and the AI and attribution-model questions are new. The appendix promises "the questionnaire changes needed to unlock next year's trends," but the published version contains the tested shifts without a separate list of 2027 changes. The sell side is also significantly more experienced: 81% of sellers have six to 10 years in online advertising, against 59% of buyers (n=75 answering).

Four year-on-year shifts clear 95% significance: partnerships longer than a year, lack of available data as a barrier, ROAS as a wanted metric and point-of-sale reach as an opportunity. Five more are flagged as indicators to watch, including the measurement barrier and closed-loop attribution.

Why this matters for the marketing community

Retail media is now a large line in European budgets. The AdEx Benchmark 2025, released in July 2026, put European retail media at 13.314 billion euros, up 16.7% and above 10% of total digital advertising for the first time, a figure that excludes in-store and off-site retail media. IAB Europe's earlier retail media statistics, released in October 2025, put the 2024 market at 13.7 billion euros with a forecast of 20.8 billion euros for 2026.

The study's central finding, that buyers want proof of incremental effect rather than an efficiency ratio, fits a run of recent research. In October 2026, a survey of 281 professionals by SMG, IAB and IAB UK found that 46% of brands said proven ROI and incremental sales would persuade them to invest more in commerce media. An IAB white paper written with Instacart in April 2026 argued that legacy measurement undercounts retail media and recommended incrementality testing and closed-loop measurement as the primary foundation. A June 2026 study by Incremental estimated that siloed attribution misses 36% to 53% of total retail media impact, a vendor-supplied figure built on more than 150,000 campaigns.

Some vendor claims still lean on ROAS. In October 2026, The Trade Desk said campaigns using retail data targeting averaged 41% higher ROAS, without publishing a sample size, attribution model or control group. Against that, IAB and IAB Europe have published guidance that separates incrementality from media-attributed ROAS, first in a one-page framework in September 2025 and then in Guidelines for Incremental Measurement in Commerce Media in November 2025, which rank methods by causal strength.

For advertisers, the practical consequence is visible in the supply data: the metrics sellers most often hand over describe delivery, not effect, and the model buyers most want is offered by fewer than a third of sellers. For retailers and networks, the report suggests that proximity to the shelf is losing its pull as a reason to buy, while access to first-party data holds. For publishers and ad tech providers building commerce media products, the AI findings mark out a gap that no one has yet filled: half of sellers are building for product discovery inside AI assistants, and the report states plainly that there is no agreed way to measure what happens there.

The 2026 edition also carries limits the headline figures do not show. The trend lines rest on 34 to 42 European buyers a year, earlier waves have been re-cleaned since publication, and several questions changed between waves.

Timeline

Summary

Who: IAB Europe and its Retail & Commerce Media Committee, chaired by Jason Wescott of WPP Media, with quantitative analysis by Caras Consulting and qualitative interviews by Ascentinel, sponsored by LuckyCart and Mirakl Ads. The survey covered 150 respondents: 91 advertisers and agencies, and 59 retailers, media owners and retail media networks. Marie-Clare Puffett of IAB Europe commented on the findings.

What: The third Attitudes to Retail Media Report. Among European buyers, 71% have partnered with retailers for more than a year (51% in 2024), demand for ROAS fell from 89% to 49%, lack of available data as a barrier rose from 31% to 58%, and reach at the point of sale fell from 82% to 62% as a reason to invest. Across all respondents, 58% of buyers want multi-touch attribution against 31% of sellers offering it, 73% of sellers still offer ROAS, 63% of sellers plan to enhance measurement, and 68% plan AI-powered campaign management.

When: Published November 3, 2026. The report does not state its fieldwork dates. Earlier editions were published in 2024 and on July 15, 2025.

Where: Europe, with the first meaningful sample from the Middle East and North Africa; the report and announcement were issued from Brussels.

Why: The study tracks how buyers and sellers of retail media in Europe are changing what they expect and supply. It shows buyers moving the case for retail media from shelf-side sales toward data and incremental effect, while seller measurement still centres on delivery metrics and ROAS, and IAB Europe's own standards and certification do not yet cover several of the metrics buyers now rank highest.