Retail media’s promise lies in connecting digital campaigns directly to in-store sales, and the IAB is pushing industry-wide standards to make that link possible, says Collin Colburn, vice president of commerce and retail media at IAB.
“The IAB is connecting digital campaigns to real in-store results through what we’re known for, which is standardization,” Colburn told Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan in a recent interview. “So we’ve done a lot of work on standardizing measurement in the store and online in digital formats.”
According to Colburn, this effort isn’t only about technology — it’s also about communication. “What I think that really means is making sure that the industry is speaking the same language,” he said. That includes consistent definitions for formats, viewability, and impressions, as well as translating standards into “bite sizeable” guidance for the wide range of retail and brand professionals who may not specialize in digital media.
Beyond cookies: First-party data and clean rooms
Asked about the loss of third-party cookies, Colburn argued that retail media is well positioned to adapt.
“This is where retail media I think shines the brightest,” he said, pointing to first-party data and privacy-safe identifiers such as loyalty IDs.
Retailers’ ability to link digital and physical customer information, he added, provides “unique qualities that retailers have and that’s really what their media networks have been built upon.”
Managing in-store ‘messiness’
Colburn acknowledged that in-store measurement is complex.
“The reason it’s so messy is because the store is an experience in and of itself,” he explained. Success, he argued, requires balancing monetization with the customer experience and focusing on progress over perfection.
“Somewhere in the middle is actually just where we need to get to in the next year, two years,” he said.
Tools like geolocation and transaction matchback are already central to bridging physical and digital.
“The matchback is kind of where a lot of the magic is made,” Colburn said, because it shows whether exposure to in-store campaigns actually drove sales tied to loyalty IDs. Other factors, like defining what counts as a “viewable impression” on digital screens or audio, are also part of the puzzle.
Role of incrementality
The conversation also turned to incrementality, a buzzword in retail media measurement.
“We talk about incrementality a lot,” Colburn said. But he urged the industry to think about it “in a channel agnostic way,” focused on whether media drove an outcome rather than which channel should get the credit.
“ROAS is really telling you efficiency, it’s not attribution,” Colburn said. “Attribution is telling you what should get credit. Incrementality should tell you what is the outcome.”
While incrementality is clearer in digital environments, he noted, it remains a “tricky area” in physical stores because it is difficult to create holdout groups. “That’s a little bit of a longer term solution that will come,” Colburn added.
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