Retail media buyers say they underuse the store
An IAB and Grocery TV survey of 100 US retail media buyers finds 43% say their organisation underuses in-store media, and 59% put inventory and scale in their top three buying criteria. For a small beauty network, the second number is the one that matters.
On 1 October 2026, the IAB and Grocery TV published In-Store Retail Media’s Full-Funnel Opportunity, a survey of 100 US retail media buyers and decision-makers (brands, agencies and retail media networks) who already spend on in-store media. The headline: 43% say their organisation underuses in-store retail media. The more useful number for anyone selling a small screen network sits next to it. Asked what matters most when they evaluate in-store media, 59% put inventory and scale in their top three.
This one is different from the in-store stories we have covered this year. Those asked shoppers whether store ads move them, and the answer was broadly yes (the OAAA survey in September, Grocery TV’s 62% figure in June). This one asks the people holding the budget what stops them spending more. Their answer is less about whether the store works and more about how hard it is to buy, measure and fill.
What happened
The study defines in-store retail media as paid advertising in physical retail environments (digital screens, audio and displays) and excludes traditional merchandising and trade promotions. So “underuse” here means media budget, not shelf deals. It is also each respondent’s view of their own organisation, not a measured spend gap.
The organisational finding is the one both sponsors lead with. Grocery TV’s CEO Marlow Nickell said in-store “has traditionally lived within shopper marketing”, and that national media, brand and retail media teams “bring different objectives, budgets and measurement approaches.” IAB’s Collin Colburn, VP commerce and retail media, framed the open question as “how to integrate in-store into their media strategy.” Read plainly: when the store sits with the trade team it is treated as a promotion line, and when it sits with a media team it gets planned as media. That is the same migration we described in retail media swallows the in-store screen: the person deciding is increasingly a media planner, not a shopper marketer.
The barriers are mostly operational. Activation complexity and creative resources together describe a channel that is still fiddly to buy and to supply. Measurement is the third. None of the three is “it doesn’t work.”
What it means for beauty
- Scale is the first filter, and it is the small network’s weakest point. A buyer who ranks inventory and scale in the top three will screen out a 40-salon network before looking at its context, however good that context is. Our network economics research and the cold-start analysis both put this at the centre: demand gets easier with size, and the first deals have to be won while small. The survey is buyer-side confirmation of that constraint.
- A small network can’t fake scale, but it can stop being hard to buy. Activation complexity is a barrier a network can remove on its own. Inventory that can be bought through a DSP the agency already runs, packaged as a curated PMP deal with standard venue IDs, can also be bundled with other supply to reach a buyer’s scale threshold. That is how niche place-based inventory reaches buyers who would never sign a direct deal for it.
- Sell to the media team, with media metrics. If brand and retail media teams use the channel more fully, a beauty network’s pitch belongs in front of them, with reach, frequency and a delivery report, not a shopper-marketing promotion calendar. The over-90% emphasis on awareness and consideration as well as sales lift helps here. A salon screen is a weak last-click channel, and a reasonable full-funnel one, as long as the network is honest about what it can prove at small scale.
- A salon is not a “retail environment” in this study. The definition covers stores. A salon with a retail shelf sits at the edge of it, and the retail media vs place-based DOOH analysis explains why the service moment is a different product from the aisle. Buyers’ habits carry over; the survey’s numbers do not describe salons.
The caveat: small sample, interested sponsor
One hundred respondents is a small base, and the release gives no split by brand, agency or retail media network, so we can’t tell whose view the 43% mostly reflects. The figures are self-reported attitudes, not spend data. The full report is gated behind a download form, so question wording could only be checked as far as the public release and trade coverage.
The study was also co-commissioned by Grocery TV, which sells in-store screen inventory (we covered its audience-targeting push in August). “Buyers underuse the channel” is a convenient finding for a seller, so treat it as directional. Some trade coverage also mislabelled the respondents: Supermarket News headlined it as “grocers” underusing retail media, when the sample was buyers at brands, agencies and networks. Nothing here is a beauty figure; the beauty read-across is ours and rests on the linked Research.
Related: The cold-start problem · Beauty DOOH network economics at scale · Retail media vs place-based DOOH · Packaging curated PMP deals for beauty · Retail media hits $200bn, the store lags · Shoppers say in-store ads move the basket