At IAB ALM 2026, Albertsons Media Collective SVP Brian Monahan explains why disciplined experimentation and new in-store measurement tech could turn the physical store into retail media’s most accountable channel yet.
Albertsons Media Collective SVP Brian Monahan
The Drum caught up Brian Monahan, the SVP of Albertsons Media Collective, at the IAB ALM 2026 annual leadership meeting and heard how he believes retail media has finally reached the point where it can prove what actually happens inside the store.
The big news: Albertsons has launched a new in-store incrementality measurement approach designed to show whether in-store media genuinely drives additional sales – not just correlation, not just attribution, but real, incremental impact.
Retail media networks have grown rapidly online and off-site, following shoppers on to streaming platforms, social feeds and mobile screens. But the physical store – where the majority of grocery transactions still happen – has remained stubbornly hard to modernize and even harder to measure.
And for Monahan, who recently featured in The Drum’s Commerce Media Power 100 list, it’s the final leg of the stool.
“In-store is not for the faint of heart,” he says. “You know, it’s one thing to have a CDP and some search ads and a partnership with Pinterest or whatever. It’s a whole other thing to be installing hardware in thousands of stores across America, with all the headaches that come with it, like closing the store down, pulling electrical and having contractors break off the fire extinguisher and flood out the front end of the store. All of that is hard.”
Yet stores are essential if retail media is to become a true end-to-end demand platform, as highlighted in a recent video series produced by The Drum – All Media is Commerce Media.
As Monahan puts it: “It’s that final piece of a demand platform that can reach a consumer who we know what they bought in the past – while they were on the couch watching TV, while driving to the store in our app – and now in our stores themselves.”
This year, he says, is about making that third leg work – and proving it works.
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Albertsons’ new measurement framework relies on disciplined experimentation: comparing stores where campaigns run with stores where they do not.
“The measurement method that we talked about is basically being able to create holdout groups at the store level,” Monahan explains. “So we can basically say, ‘Look, whatever we did in this store, we didn’t do it over here, so we can see there was some lift there.’”
To make this possible, Albertsons has installed low-energy RFID beacons on carts and baskets, allowing the company to analyze movement and exposure patterns anonymously. “We can do time stamping and pathing analysis to look at the effect of exposure to content on screen.”
Privacy safeguards remain critical. “We purposefully do not connect the beacon to the loyalty number. We choose not to. We want to be very mindful of privacy compliance, so we’re looking at it in aggregate.”
The technology is already live in 80 stores, with plans to expand into roughly 800 more locations this year.
Measurement, Monahan says, is the prerequisite for everything else. “This whole big, very expensive build out of off-site, on-site, in-store… it doesn’t work if you can’t bring targeting and measurement.”
In-store media has traditionally been treated as a final push to close a sale. A digital end cap. A nudge at checkout. But Albertsons is discovering that stores influence far more than impulse purchases.
“We’re realizing you can actually plant an idea. Like, ‘Oh, maybe I should go down that other aisle.’ Or, ‘Oh my gosh, look at that, that’s a new innovation… I’m gonna go seek it out.’”
Pharmacy trips, for example, often expand into broader baskets. “You have a sick kid in the house. Sure, you might go to the pharmacy, but you also need some healthy soup, fruit, comfort food.”
Meanwhile, GLP-1 medications are reshaping food innovation. “It’s wild, the product innovation that’s happening in the food space now as a result of GLP-1s. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Stores, in other words, are becoming discovery environments – not simply transaction points.
Another shift concerns what success looks like. Simply switching a shopper from one brand to another benefits no one in the long term. “It doesn’t really do my business any good if I just shift somebody from Coke to Pepsi,” Monahan says. “Like, I need to build the carbonated category.”
Albertsons is therefore evolving measurement beyond ROAS toward metrics such as new-to-category growth and predicted lifetime value. “What gets measured gets done,” he says. “So our measurement is evolving.”
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Monahan’s thinking is rooted in what he calls “collective growth”: the idea that retail media should behave less like a tollbooth and more like a partnership, because retailer and advertiser win (or lose) together.
“Retail media doesn’t care,” he says. “We have the same objective as our advertiser. We want to sell the same product that they do. It’s an incremental sale for us. So that should unlock a level of collaboration you don’t normally have in a media transaction.”
That’s the logic behind Albertsons’ push to reward best practice – then share risk with the advertisers who demonstrate it. “For advertisers that have proven to us that they are best in class at using our platform, it’s a case of let’s reward them. Let’s take on the risk,” he says.
And if results fall short? “We’ll guarantee that, if you fall below it, we’ll fix it. We’ll bonus you. We’ll do whatever.” And now that philosophy has a name – and a trophy.
In December, Albertsons announced its inaugural Alby Awards, recognizing top-performing advertising partners, and said winners would receive a custom ROAS guarantee for Q1 2026, benchmarked to their Q1 2025 performance.
It’s a neat encapsulation of Monahan’s broader argument: if retail media is going to ask brands for deeper commitment – across onsite, offsite and in-store – then the network has to “put its money where its mouth is,” backing measurement confidence with accountability.
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Monahan’s years on the agency side (including at Dentsu) also shape his view that retail media networks must behave like media platforms if they want to win brand budgets. “We need to behave like any other publisher and not operate in our own little bubble.”
That means integrating into planning tools, sharing conversion data via clean rooms and proving impact beyond retailer-specific campaigns – all while the store build-out keeps grinding forward.
Digital media scaled easily. Physical stores do not. Screens must be installed, wiring pulled, contractors managed and stores sometimes closed for work. Mistakes are messy and visible.
But for Monahan, solving that headache unlocks something online media cannot: influence (and measurement) at the exact moment of purchase
Retail media has conquered the web. Now it must conquer the real world. And if Albertsons can prove that in-store media truly drives incremental sales, retail media’s final frontier may finally become measurable.