CANNES — With so many retail media networks now taking off, how are ad buyers ever going to measure them all?
Retail media networks’ varying measurement approaches create significant complexity for marketers trying to evaluate performance across platforms, according to Amie Owen, global chief commerce officer, IPG Mediabrands.
“I don’t necessarily think it’s a challenge, it’s something we all have to solve together,” Owen said in this video interview with Beet.TV at Cannes Lions.
Transparency concerns
According to a January 2025 report by eMarketer, U.S. retail media ad spending is projected to reach over $62 billion in 2025, marking an increase of more than $10 billion from the previous year.
But the complexity of managing multiple networks has led to a demand for more cohesive and comparable metrics to assess campaign performance effectively.
“There are some concerns because there’s not as much transparency that we need to actually understand what they’re doing as far as methodology or measurement,” Owen said. “What we’re finding clearly is that they are looking at it differently. And so that’s what makes it kind of hard.”
This measurement fragmentation has become a major industry focus, with the IAB and other industry bodies working to establish standardized definitions.
Simplicity as strategy
As retail media continues its explosive growth trajectory, Owen has made simplification her core mission for 2024.
“This year is (about) simplicity,” Owen explained. “It’s just really (about) understanding how do we make everything more simple for us, for our clients, and then for actually how to actually do successful work.”
Owen sees artificial intelligence as a critical tool for tackling retail media’s growing complexity, particularly for streamlining processes that have historically been manual and time-consuming.
In November 2024, Kinesso launched its “Experimentation Lab,” a platform designed to help marketers design and analyze experiments across various channels using AI and automation to accelerate the process.
