Retail media: what buyers (really) expect on transparency, standards and data

What excites media buyers most, and what frustrates them most? To understand their expectations, Open Garden approached around ten of them - in media agencies, independents and on the advertiser side - as part of its Retail Media Innovators event held on 5 November.

This article is the result of those conversations, presented in aggregated and anonymised form to give a clear view of the main dynamics.

The word that comes up most is integration. After years of disorderly deployment, retail media is entering a convergence phase in which activation, measurement and value creation are finally lining up.

Buyers welcome the emergence of full-funnel models that progressively break down the silos between on-site ad formats, off-site and (perhaps one day) digital in-store.

Blending channels opens the way to a far more strategic view of retail media, now designed as a genuine brand and performance lever rather than an extension of trade.

Consolidation among players is seen positively: it promises more technological coherence, more data volume and better execution capacity.

It has become a gimmick, a word heard in every sales deck without anyone ever seeing the effects. Buyers denounce the ambient hypocrisy around transparency, a notion used for everything with no concrete translation.

Between opaque costs, restricted data access and impossible audits, the promise of a clear and traceable ecosystem remains a dead letter at some retailers, our buyers say. Distrust settles in all the more as sales houses keep posting high margins without always justifying them clearly.

For many, this structural opacity holds back investment and feeds suspicion: "as long as we do not know where the money goes, we will invest cautiously". An opacity that, as many media buyers point out, is hard to sustain now that Amazon has decided to open the hood.

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This extends the previous point, since it is again a gap between what is said and what happens. Except it bears more broadly on the operational effectiveness of the tools retailers offer.

The verdict is harsh: lack of technological autonomy, limited reporting and fuzzy attribution windows. Buyers voice their exasperation with a fragmented ecosystem where the promise of measurement and efficiency runs into rigid and, here again, often opaque practices.

The absence of self-serve, particularly in grocery, comes back as a leitmotif. Some miss the period when Criteo largely structured the market and had made self-serve one of the pillars of its offer.

Others are more nuanced, pointing out that advertisers do not let media agencies bill them for time spent in the tools. In that context it is often more comfortable for agencies to lean on the retailer in a fully managed-service model.

But - and this is the paradox - many also complain about environments where the agency is confined to an execution role, with no real access to tools or data. Somewhat schizophrenic, we agree.

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On this point the consensus is total: retail media cannot scale without a common framework. Buyers are asking for standardised KPIs, independent measurement and interoperability between sales houses.

Today each player defines its own calculation logic - ROAS, incrementality, viewability - which makes any comparison impossible. Add cultural barriers: internal silos, wariness of anything new, and a shortage of people trained on these new hybrid models.

That absence of a "common language" prevents retail media from being fully integrated into global media planning. The result: media plans that cannot be compared, performance that is hard to audit, and costs that are hard to justify to advertisers. All the more so as incrementality, discussed for several years now, is still not cracked.

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Amazon remains the absolute reference, not only for its volume but for its technological maturity. Its strength lies in an end-to-end integrated stack: DSP, AMC, data cloud, real-time reporting.

That fluidity creates an unmatched user experience for buyers, who can activate, measure and optimise from a single environment. All the more so since the latest Unboxed, held after our conversations with buyers, which merged the Ads Console and Amazon DSP interfaces into a single full-funnel media buying tool.

Most French retailers suffer by comparison, still dependent on a patchwork of third-party solutions that are not always well integrated.

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Buyers do not dispute the strategic value of retailer data. On the contrary, it is seen as retail media's main differentiator. But its potential remains largely untapped: heterogeneous databases, lack of freshness, excessive segmentation and prohibitive costs for off-site activation.

Many regret that retailers monetise before industrialising, with no real governance strategy and no transparency on dataset quality. First-party data is a rough diamond: promising, but still badly cut.

A diamond that, our buyers hope, will become more accessible to them. On that front, a deal like the one struck between The Trade Desk and Valiuz is welcomed for making retailer data more liquid.

Data that, one buyer hopes, will be able to flow from DSPs into offline ecosystems that are digitising, such as DOOH, audio or addressable TV. And at a far more affordable price, because capturing non-captive advertisers will require aligning with the rates of other data providers.

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Alliances such as Valiuz+Infinity or Unlimitail+Coopérative U are judged necessary, even welcome. They embody a will to structure the market, pool data and create scale against Amazon.

Good news on paper, then. But for now buyers remain cautious: these groupings struggle to deliver real technological coherence and common legibility.

Above all, they come with price inflation that retailers justify by their market share and buyers struggle to understand. The recent outcry over Valiuz's new commercial policy in grocery is a good example.

Expectations are high on the ability to deliver a measurable, fluid and competitive offer. To capture serious budgets they will have to open up to agencies, to in-store, and offer genuinely customer-centric solutions.

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Retail media still lives on a strong trade heritage. A lot of budget comes from reallocation rather than new lines, and negotiation logic still dominates, as plenty of buyers confirmed to us.

But the shift is under way: marketing departments are starting to take back control, and buyers sense a convergence between data, media and commerce.

The challenge now is to build unified steering, where investment answers business objectives rather than commercial agreements. Proof of it: retail media is slowly starting to appear on the radar of advertisers' procurement teams.

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Every signal points to a deep transformation of the sector around three trends:

The arrival of agentic commerce - where intelligent assistants anticipate consumer needs - is already redrawing the line between retail and media, as we explained in a recent article.

It is early days, but our experts picture a world where buying is no longer centred on the product but on use and context: intent marketing, contextualised and predictive.

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