NEW YORK – Retail media has spent the past few years being treated like advertising’s golden child. Money poured in, decks multiplied and everyone claimed miraculous returns. Now comes the less glamorous phase: proving it.
Brian Monahan of Albertsons Media Collective arrived at the Beet.TV AI Media Summit with Horizon Media carrying a message for marketers who are tired of mystery math. The industry, he suggested, needs fewer vanity claims and more honest accounting.
Monahan described Albertsons’ pitch as “couch to checkout,” shorthand for a full-funnel platform designed to follow shoppers from streaming TV to social feeds to store aisles and checkout lanes.
“All of this is a way to reach a known customer from couch to checkout to influence their purchase and drive growth,” he said in this interview with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan.
That means targeting shoppers while they watch connected TV, scroll Instagram, drive toward a nearby store, build lists in the app or stand in front of a shelf trying to remember what brand of cereal their children tolerate.
Metric circus is losing its audience
Monahan’s sharper point was aimed at measurement, where identical labels often hide wildly different calculations.
“The industry will move forward with optimizing where investments are made, based on the performance they drive, when we have better understanding of apples-to-apples comparison,” he said.
Translation: everyone says they measure performance, but not everyone means the same thing. Some metrics are less science than costume jewelry.
Monahan said Albertsons is trying to be transparent about the methodological choices behind its numbers so advertisers can judge results more fairly. In an industry where spreadsheets often arrive dressed as scripture, that counts as rebellion.
Why governance suddenly matters
Monahan also discussed a recent white paper from Albertsons Media Collective focused on incremental return on ad spend, or iROAS, which he called a better gauge of whether ads actually caused sales rather than merely hovered nearby when sales happened.
“This most recent one is examining iROAS, or incremental ROAS, which we think is a better metric of true causality of ad exposure,” he said.
But he quickly added the warning label.
“The devil’s in the details with how you actually do that calculation,” Monahan said, citing attribution windows, control groups and product assignment choices that can swing results dramatically.
That is the governance issue in plain English: if everyone can turn the dials differently, then the number on the slide may reveal more about the calculator than the campaign.
Complexity is real, excuses are optional
Consumers now bounce across channels, screens and physical stores in messy patterns that make old-school media planning look quaint.
“The way people are moving through media, picking up information, building opinions, preferences, and ultimate purchase decisions, that is more complex,” Monahan said.
His answer was practical rather than mystical: “test and learn as quickly as possible,” supported by data people can actually trust.
Next frontier is inside the store
For Monahan, lasting growth will come from reaching shoppers offsite, onsite and in store. He argued the final category remains underdeveloped in the U.S. because it is expensive, operationally painful and requires installing hardware across thousands of locations.
In other words, retail media’s next leap may depend less on buzzwords and more on screws, screens and electricians.
“We have true retail media that’s driving real incremental growth by reaching a known customer all the way through their journey, and then measuring outcomes,” he said.
A radical concept for 2026: if you claim performance, you may soon have to prove it.
You’re watching coverage from The AI Media Summit, A Beet.TV & Horizon Media Collaboration, presented by Seedtag & The Trade Desk. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
