ANA Develops a Unified Measurement Standard for Retail Media Networks

Retail media networks (RMNs — platforms where retailers sell advertising on their own sites and apps) have grown so quickly over the past five years that marketers have found it nearly impossible to compare performance across platforms. To address that, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) is developing guidance on behalf of its members to standardize retail media measurement, drawing input from major chains including Walmart, Albertsons and Target — though Amazon has not yet joined the process.

The ANA is preparing to publish a report titled 'Standardizing Retail Media Measurement,' which lays out a set of recommendations for what brands should ask of RMNs before, during and after spending their budgets: independent third-party measurement and verification, transparency around measurement methodology and definitions, adoption of a standard 14-day loopback window for tallying results, a fuller performance context that goes beyond attributed sales alone, and, most importantly, a single, shared definition of the term 'outcome.'

The retail media subcommittee under the ANA's Media Measurement Leadership Council pulled in media leaders from more than 40 brands, including Mondelez, PepsiCo, Hershey, Colgate-Palmolive, Clorox and Intel, said Jason Turbovitz, the ANA's executive vice president of media and measurement. Once the guidance was drafted, the ANA also discussed it with a number of RMN platforms, including Walmart Connect, CVS Media Edge, Instacart, Albertson's Media Collective, BJ's Media Edge and Roundel.

Jackson Bazley, ANA's executive vice president of measurement for marketers, described the problem this way: 'When brands try to compare results across different networks, it's like comparing purple to a banana, or to a 9.7-star rating.' He said feedback from RMNs has generally been positive, with the overall consensus being that 'everything here makes sense,' even if some practical challenges remain.

Liz Roche, vice president of media and measurement at Albertsons Media Collective, backed the effort: 'Standardization is certainly real, but it has to start with a shared foundation and a commitment to transparency — it doesn't mean every network has to operate exactly the same way. What matters is that advertisers understand how the metrics are calculated,' she said. The initiative builds on a baseline retail media metrics report released by the MRC and IAB in 2024, with companies such as IAS and Nielsen under discussion as third-party verifiers — including DoubleVerify, which IAS is currently in the process of acquiring.