Retail Media Enters Its Accountability Era as Incrementality Measurement Goes From Optional to Expected

Retail media is closing in on $70 billion in U.S. ad spend for 2026, but the industry's measurement infrastructure hasn't kept pace. A new State of Retail Media report from Skai and Stratably — surveying 166 retail media advertisers — found that only 15% of marketers say their organization is "very or extremely effective" at measuring retail media performance. That's a sobering number for a channel approaching the scale of traditional television.

The report's most telling finding: the gap between measurement leaders and laggards is widening, not narrowing.

The Incrementality Divide

Brands that have invested in incrementality measurement are pulling ahead. Among those actively measuring incrementality, 54% report reduced wasted spend, 49% say they've increased new customer acquisition, and 29% have improved their competitive positioning. These aren't marginal improvements — they represent the kind of performance gains that justify dedicated measurement investment.

Yet 14% of brands still aren't measuring incrementality at all, and more than half cite limited analytics and data science resources as their biggest barrier. The challenge, the report makes clear, isn't missing data — it's organizational capability. Advertisers now average six retail media networks and expect that number to grow to 11 by the end of 2026. Managing measurement across that many platforms with constrained analytics teams is where most organizations break down.

CES 2026: The Accountability Moment

CES 2026 crystallized the shift. As eMarketer observed, retail media networks spent the show focused not on inventory expansion but on measurement, data access, and intelligence — the foundational capabilities needed to prove their value as budgets face increased scrutiny.

The standout announcement came from Albertsons Media Collective, which launched an in-store incrementality measurement framework using matched-market testing. The methodology compares test stores running in-store campaigns against carefully selected control stores with no media exposure, using nearly 60 variables for store matching to reduce statistical bias.

The beta results were concrete. A Mondelez campaign promoting Sargento Cheese Bakes across 116 Albertsons banner stores delivered a $2.41 incremental ROAS, a 1.5% conversion rate, a 14% lift in in-store sales, and over 5.5 million impressions. These aren't modeled estimates — they're measured causal lift at the store level, the kind of evidence that in-store retail media has historically been unable to produce.

Albertsons plans to expand its in-store digital display network by approximately 800 stores in 2026, covering 10 divisions. The measurement framework will scale with it.

Other RMNs Step Up

Albertsons wasn't alone. DoorDash Ads launched new audience targeting using real restaurant ordering behavior alongside self-serve dashboards showing brand health and competitive positioning. Instacart debuted a data hub clean room providing access to lifetime value, new-to-brand, and repurchase frequency metrics with flexible attribution. Walmart Connect, meanwhile, is testing ads within its AI shopping agent "Sparky" and launched "Marty," an agentic AI tool for campaign building and predictive measurement.

The common thread: every major RMN is investing in proving outcomes, not just selling impressions.

The Standards Backdrop

This accountability push builds on the measurement standards infrastructure laid in late 2025. IAB and IAB Europe's Commerce Media Measurement Standards V2 — with its compliance deadline of July 2026 — established standardized definitions for gross and net sales reporting and introduced the industry's first incrementality guidelines for commerce media. The IAB's separate Framework for Maturing In-Store Media Measurement addressed the specific challenges of measuring formats like digital endcaps, smart displays, and in-store audio.

A joint report from Dentsu and Northwestern's Medill School, "Rethinking Retail Media Measurement 2026," goes further, arguing that the problem isn't fragmented data but fragmented definitions of success. RMNs have unified data across channels but failed to unify how organizations define and measure outcomes.

What Measurement Teams Should Do Now

The path forward for brands running significant retail media spend is becoming clearer:

Retail media's growth phase rewarded scale and speed. The next phase will reward proof.