Retail Media Networks, Second Wave: Standards, DSP Integration, and the End of the Silo

The first wave of US retail media networks was, straightforwardly, a land grab. Every retailer with a loyalty program stood up a media offering, sold their shelf as inventory, and captured advertising budget that used to flow to search and social. The economics were compelling for the retailer and confusing for the advertiser, which was more or less the point.

The second wave, currently underway, looks different. The IAB's Retail Media Measurement Guidelines, published in September 2023 and updated through the intervening cycles, gave advertisers a shared vocabulary for in-store and on-site attribution that did not previously exist. At roughly the same time, the major DSPs finished the technical work of integrating retail-media inventory alongside programmatic display and CTV, which means brand teams can, for the first time, plan retail media inside the same buying stack as everything else. Those two developments together end the era in which every retail media network was a walled garden that a brand had to buy in isolation.

The near-term consequence for brand marketers is that the case for consolidation has become defensible. When each RMN could only be measured on its own terms, buying from many was a hedge. When the measurement is standardized and the inventory is available through common DSPs, the marginal RMN adds cost without adding capability, and the concentration question becomes real. We expect brand-side procurement to spend the second half of 2026 pressuring their agency partners for exactly that consolidation.

The consequence for the retailers themselves is more uncomfortable. Once measurement is standardized and inventory is portable, the differentiation collapses back onto what it always should have been: audience quality, first-party data richness, and the specific decisions the retailer can inform that no one else can. The retailers who invested in genuine measurement partnership and data cleanliness are about to have a much better year than the ones who invested in a slick sell-side deck.

For a CMO or a chief digital officer at a large advertiser, the working question is straightforward. If your current retail-media spend were re-planned inside a single DSP against IAB-standardized metrics, how many of your current RMN relationships would survive the exercise? The answer is likely fewer than you are buying from today, and the conversation with your agency about which to keep is the conversation of the next planning cycle.