Standard Issue
Ad Tech Insights
A Milestone in the Making
The story: After years of effort, the IAB and IAB Europe have released the first-ever set of retail media standards. These long-anticipated guidelines aim to establish consistent definitions and metrics across the retail media industry, marking a critical step toward unifying an increasingly fragmented ad landscape. These metrics are designed to address the diversity of retail environments. For instance, they help differentiate an ad displayed on an ATM machine near a store entrance from one shown on a digital screen embedded in a shopping cart.
The new standards provide clear frameworks for measuring retail media campaigns and include:
Gross impressions
Opportunity to see (OTS)
Likelihood-to-see (LTS)
The creation of these standards was no small feat. Kevel and other ad tech innovators began advocating for retail media standardization in 2023 with an established working group. Their efforts later merged with the IAB Tech Lab, sparking an 18-month long collaboration.
But as Evan Hovorka, VP of Product and Innovation at Albertsons Media Collective, puts it, “standardization is an easy thing to rally behind.” The real challenge is in driving adoption and ensuring enforcement across platforms and retailers. However, in today’s market, where CPG advertisers demand consistency and collaborations, standards have become a necessity, says Hovorka. He also notes that while avoiding standardization may have been viable years ago, it no longer addresses the needs of modern advertisers: “Now we have to think of ourselves as an industry and work together to solve these problems.”
The takeaway: Retail media standards signal significant progress, promising greater clarity for advertisers. But their success depends on widespread adoption and the challenge will be ensuring retailers and platforms align -- it’s only through collective industry effort that the full potential of standardized retail media can be realized.
Comcast is launching Universal Ads, an ad platform meant to simplify the ad-buying process for small- and medium-sized businesses. Here’s what you should know:
Universal Ads will allow advertisers to buy spots on premium video content on the streaming businesses of traditional media companies. Mark Marshall, Chairman of Global Advertising and Partnerships for NBCUniversal, CNBC’s parent company, explained that “Universal Ads is intended to create new demand from advertisers who have not traditionally worked with us.”
Comcast has signed deals with media companies including NBCUniversal, Warner Bros. Discovery, AMC Networks, Fox Corporation, A+E Networks, Roku, and more.
The platform, which is set to launch in Q1, is meant to attract more ad dollars to media companies’ streaming services as advertisers have invested heavily in tech and social media.
Comcast built the free, self-service platform using its ad tech company FreeWheel, which many of the partners that have already signed on are clients of.
According to CNBC, media executives are expressing that traditional linear TV is still an important outlet for advertisers because it reaches more demographics than social media does. They also noted that linear and streaming are no longer thought of independently of the other, but are often grouped together in conversation.
🌟 PUBLISHED: Kevel Blog “Navigating the Future: Key Commerce Media Trends for 2025”
The retail media landscape has grown increasingly competitive and success will hinge on leveraging diverse media types, robust performance metrics, and embracing new tech. In this Kevel blog, we explore the top trends shaping the future of retail media in 2025.
Check out 2025’s biggest opportunities by reading our full blog here.
Keep Learning
WATCH
Path to Purchase Institute's Patrycja Malinowska and SMG's Samuel Knights and Sean Crawford reflect on the past 12 months as well as what's to come in the commerce marketing industry.
READ
The Path to Purchase Institute reached out to industry professionals, experts, and marketers to find out what they’re flagging as the next big things in retail media.
LISTEN
This episode of the eMarketing Association Podcast is joined by Kevel Founder & CEO James Avery as he talks about driving standardization and an OpenRTB Protocol for retail media (Listening time: 27:04).
