Think Digital Is Messy? Try the Real World. IAB's Collin Colburn on In-Store Retail Media

"You think digital's messy? Physical's even more messy."

That's how Collin Colburn, Vice President of Commerce and Retail Media at the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), sums up the challenge of building retail media in the physical store.

The potential is obvious — 80%+ of retail purchases still happen in brick and mortar — but as Collin tells host James Kotecki, in-store has been "stubbornly stuck in pilot mode for too long." He explains why the real world is a hard place to build retail media - and also why it’s so promising.

Colburn draws on a decade tracking the industry from his early days starting Forrester's retail media research practice.

https://theloomaproject.com/

Great quotes include:

• "We cannot replicate measurement in the store from what we’ve done in digital. The physical environment does not lend itself well to the way in which we've built measurement on websites."

• "Retail media has been promised to be this closed loop, outcomes driven system. So we should have a higher bar than a lot of other forms of digital media."

• "We really have a gap between retail and media. . . . And that gap shows up in the way that we criticize [measurement] frameworks.”

• On the idea of "build it and they will come" for retail media: "For most retailers, they ain't coming at the pace and volume that a lot of the major consultancies pitch them on it coming at. Many of them are saying ‘Where’s my $1 billion advertising business?’”

• "On the retailer side, I actually think it's more about the unsexy work that now needs to happen of operational excellence. No one wants to talk about org charts or the structural incentives that exist within a retail media network . . . but that's the next phase of real maturity."