The advertising business has always had a complicated relationship with measurement, which is to say it has always preferred the measurements that make it look good and questioned the ones that do not.

Now the retail media sector — which has grown into a $70 billion enterprise in the United States, according to Emarketer — is discovering that building the airplane while flying it works better for airplanes than for advertising accountability. A new report from the Association of National Advertisers suggests that the absence of common standards for measuring whether retail media actually works has begun to slow the flow of new money into the category.

The ANA surveyed its members, a roster that includes marketing executives from Bayer, Hershey, Kenvue, and Mondelez, among others. Fifty-five percent of them cited the lack of measurement standards as retail media's most significant obstacle. (One might have expected "price" or "my C.F.O. asking difficult questions," but no.) The executives also complained that each retail media network measures performance differently, making comparisons across retailers something close to impossible.

This is not, of course, an entirely new problem. The digital advertising business spent much of the last two decades arguing about whether anyone was actually watching the ads, and if so, for how long, and whether that mattered. Retail media, which places advertisements on retailer websites and apps where consumers are already shopping, had seemed to offer a cleaner transaction: the ad runs, the purchase happens, the circle closes. But as the category has expanded beyond search ads into streaming video and offsite placements, the measurement questions have multiplied accordingly.

Retailers, for their part, are responding to advertiser concerns by introducing new formats and making new promises about brand-building — which is another way of saying they are asking for more money while the debate about what the old money accomplished continues.

Original story published in adweek.com: "4 Challenges That Are Holding Back Retailers’ Ambitious Advertising Plans, According to the ANA"