ANA updates efforts to standardize retail media network measurement

The marketer industry organization today plans to issue its “Retail Media Measurement Standardization” report, which offers a multi-point set of recommendations for brands to ask of RMNs before, during and after spending budget on any number of those platforms. They include asking for valid third-party measurement and validation, demanding transparency into measurement methods, logic and definitions, standardizing a 14-day loopback window, asking for more complete performance context beyond just attributed sales and, most importantly, get the same definition for what “outcomes” mean.

The retail media measurement subcommittee of the ANA’s Media Measurement Leadership Council picked more than 40 brands’ heads of media to help pull together the guidelines, including Mondelez, PepsiCo, Hershey, Colgate Palmolive, Clorox and Intel, according to Jason Trubowitz, the organization’s evp of media and measurement. Once the framework was assembled, ANA ran it by several RMN platforms for feedback, including Walmart Connect (and Sam’s Club Connect), CVS Media Edge, Instacart, Albertson’s Media Collective, BJ’s Media Edge and Roundel.

Jackson Bazley, ANA’s evp of measurement for marketers, summed up the problem the organization is trying to solve: “Brands that use retail media networks, if they are trying to compare their performance across different networks, a lot of times it’s like evaluating purple to bananas to 9.7 stars,” he quipped. 

The good news is, the feedback has been positive, said Bazley. “The overwhelming consensus was, everything in here makes sense,” he paraphrased marketer feedback. “We actually think it is beneficial to the buy side to have this a level of commonality. There are some operational challenges to achieve some of these things, but nothing in here is out of left field or is untenable or doesn’t make sense to us. That was generally the consensus response from that.”

This iteration at setting standards for measurement builds on a report issued in 2024 by the MRC and the IAB that set baseline metrics for retail media, he added. “We know that if you can’t get those right, then there’s no point in going on to the next level of attribution and onto the next level of causality,” said Bazley.

RMNs are supportive of the effort. “Standardization is absolutely realistic, but it has to start with a common foundation and a commitment to transparency rather than an expectation that every retail media network will operate the exact same way,” said Liz Roche, vp of media and measurement at Albertsons Media Collective, in an email. “What matters is that advertisers can understand how metrics are defined, what inputs and methodologies sit behind them, and where differences exist. Without that transparency, marketers run the risk of creating false precision by looking at numbers that appear comparable but really aren’t. The ANA’s framework is a meaningful step because it gives the industry a practical place to start. Ultimately, it’s up to networks to execute from that baseline and marketers to understand what’s behind the metrics they’re seeing.”

Of course, third-party validation will be a key to making buyers and brands feel more comfortable that no one’s grading their own homework (as so much of the walled gardens still do to this day). Although Trubowitz and Bazley were careful not to endorse any one third-party vendor in the ANA’s recommendations, IAS and DoubleVerify — the latter of which is in the process of being bought by Nielsen, which for better or worse is the gold standard in video measurement — were names brought up as likely parties. 

Glaringly absent is Amazon, the OG of retail media and ecommerce. Trubowitz said the only reason it’s not there is because the ANA didn’t hear back from the company in seeking feedback. “We would have loved to have them,” he said. “The truth is, getting the numbers that we did isn’t always easy because you just have to find the right people at these massive organizations.”