CANNES – Retail media has gone from niche topic to industry obsession in just a few years, and Liz Roche, vice president of media and measurement at Albertsons Media Collective, says the reasons are clear.
“I think especially this year, we’re in a pretty interesting climate when it comes to just our political climate and our economic climate is unique,” Roche said during a fireside chat at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity with Jon Watts, managing director of the Coalition for Innovation in Media Measurement.
Against that backdrop, she said, marketers are being pushed to justify every dollar they spend.
“The days of executing media and executing campaigns without measurement, without understanding what’s happening at the register, it’s hard. That’s a hard thing to justify,” Roche added. Fortunately, retail media’s rich data environment allows brands to “close the loop” and “really be accountable to their investments and show ROI,” she said.
Trust, transparency and standardization at the core
The need for “accountable media” is central to Roche’s mission at Albertsons and within the broader retail media industry. That includes building trust, increasing transparency and driving toward standard measurement standards.
“With retail media, the way you can measure and the way that you can prove out ROAS is wildly different based on technique, how you’re factoring up, how you’re understanding cash transactions, where your match rates land,” Roche said.
The lack of consistency from retailer to retailer, she said, creates confusion for marketers and makes it harder for them to compare opportunities or track results.
“Getting into that standardization track, which I know Albertsons has been pushing for in the industry in partnership with IAB, I’ve joined the IAB Commerce Board to help kind of push this forward,” she said.
Standardization, Roche said, is not about eliminating competition but about creating a level playing field.
“We all want to be held to a high standard. I think there’s room for all of us in market. We all have a unique value prop,” she added.
Laying the foundation for more advanced measurement
The push for basic, standardized metrics is just the first step. Roche said it is essential for enabling more advanced measurement models, especially as retail media extends across a growing number of channels.
“We are operating in a lot of new channels. Specifically at Albertsons, we just launched our in-store digital media network,” she said.
Once the fundamentals are aligned, the industry can unlock deeper insights.
“If we can standardize, then we can start moving into some of those more advanced models to understand how these channels interact. Where one plus one equals three, where one plus one equals five,” Roche said.
From campaign-level metrics to long-term growth
Roche believes the industry is undergoing a major shift from focusing on isolated campaign performance to long-term, enterprise-wide measurement.
“A bit of a push is a vast understatement,” Roche joked when asked about the trend. “Massive, massive drive.”
As a retailer-first organization, Albertsons’ role is to help partners grow their businesses holistically, Roche said.
“All of these things are driving shopper to shelf pushing units. We are a growth partner and our partners want to understand what that growth looks like,” she said.
For many partners, that means tracking metrics like lifetime value (LTV) beyond short-term promotions.
“They’re launching new flavors, they may be launching new sizes, and how are they getting one incremental SKU into basket? But also how is that behavior persisting beyond promo period or beyond campaign period?” Roche said.
Untapped potential of in-store media
Roche described in-store media as the industry’s next big measurement challenge, and a key priority for Albertsons.
“The store for us is a massive canvas to really paint a full funnel experience,” she said. With 45 million loyalty members and 35 million weekly in-store shoppers, the opportunity is significant.
Albertsons’ recent partnership with Stratacache aims to close the measurement gap for in-store media by combining technology, data and retail operations.
“Their measurement tools and their measurement technology comes combined with our stores and of course, our teams, we’re really cooking up something interesting there,” Roche said.
AI has been here all along
Despite the buzz around AI, Roche noted that machine learning has been central to retail media for years.
“We’ve been AI-ing for a long time,” she said. From campaign optimization to measurement, AI and machine learning have long powered retail media’s growth, although Roche emphasized that innovation in this area is ongoing.
“It’s something that we’re continuing to press forward into and to understand how we can generate efficacy for our partners and continue building that transparent bridge,” she said.
Brand marketing and non-endemic expansion
Roche sees significant growth ahead as retail media moves beyond core commerce-focused advertisers.
“2026 brand marketing and non-endemic? I think that’s our next frontier,” she said. Brands outside the traditional retail ecosystem can increasingly leverage retail media audiences to drive awareness and track real outcomes.
“They want to see the measurement. So that probably doesn’t mean that they are going to be involved in, for example, developing promos or being part of a couponing campaign. But what it does mean is that they can leverage Albertsons audiences in the CTV space and they can work that high funnel while also getting kind of insight into how this is pushing units,” Roche said.
Ultimately, Roche says retail media has space for all marketers to engage, provided the focus remains on accountability, transparency and growth.
“It doesn’t have to be at the shelf edge. It can be anywhere along that funnel stage,” she said.
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