Retailers don’t know what’s in their stores – and it’s holding commerce media back

But as those channels mature, the more consequential question is no longer how brands buy commerce media online. It’s what happens next – and increasingly, the answer sits on the shop floor.

We caught up with SMG at CES 2026, where much of the noise was about AI, automation and efficiency. Yet here the conversation returned to something more basic and more difficult: physical stores.

“Very few retailers actually know what their stores look like inside,” says Ollie Shayer, senior director of global strategy and innovation at SMG. “They don’t know what fixtureization they have, what inventory exists, or what could even be monetized.”

That lack of understanding is becoming a constraint. Digital commerce media has already taken the low-hanging fruit. Growth now means dealing with physical reality: thousands of stores, inconsistent layouts, legacy systems and environments that were never designed to function as media channels in the first place.

SMG has spent years operating in exactly that gap. Founded in the UK in 2008 by Matt Lee and Joel Hopwood, both early figures in the monetization of loyalty data through Dunnhumby, the business was building in-store, at-till and shopper media long before “retail media” became a boardroom phrase.

That experience shapes how it reads the current US moment.

“Retail media here grew up digital-first,” says Sean Crawford, managing director, North America at SMG. “On-site and off-site were the easiest dollars to take. Now retailers are asking a harder question: if I want to keep growing, where does the next wave come from?”

Increasingly, the answer is the store – but not in the simplistic way it’s often discussed.

“There’s a tendency to reduce the store to a screen,” Crawford says. “But the store is an entire environment. Screens, audio, sampling, print, experiential – all of these are still bought in silos in the US.”

That fragmentation creates friction for brands. Buying in-store media often means stitching together multiple vendors, measurement frameworks and incentives – all while hoping execution lines up with what’s happening elsewhere in the plan.

“What gets lost,” Crawford adds, “is any sense of shopper mission.”

This is where the US finds itself at an inflection point. Digital commerce media is well-understood, well-staffed and well-automated. In-store is none of those things. It is operationally harder, less standardized and far more physical.

But it’s also where most purchasing still happens.

In markets that encountered this earlier, the lesson was not that in-store is glamorous, but that it needs to be treated as infrastructure.

“Before you talk about media,” Shayer says, “you have to know what you’ve actually got. What inventory exists in your stores? What can be commercialized? What needs to stay for trading or brand messaging?”

Only then do questions of technology and measurement follow.

“There’s been an over-fixation on one-to-one measurement,” he says. “But in-store is a one-to-many channel. You don’t measure outdoor the same way you measure social – and yet that’s what people keep trying to do.”

His view is deliberately pragmatic. “You don’t need perfect, one-to-one measurement to get an in-store retail media network running. There’s enough upside and enough evidence from test-and-control to prove incrementality. Waiting for perfection just slows growth.”

That pragmatism extends to experience. In-store doesn’t need to be theatrical everywhere to be effective anywhere.

“You don’t do this across your entire estate,” Crawford says. “You pick flagship stores. Cities where brands want to show up. The impact is disproportionate.”

Examples range from Tesco wrapping a store opposite Wembley Stadium for the Champions League final, to Kroger turning a pedestrian crossing into Oreos, to Boots creating experiential spaces designed to live beyond the store via live streaming and content.

“One store can generate column inches worth their weight in gold,” Shayer says. “For brands, for retailers, and for the retail media network itself.”

The harder part is making all of this buyable. “Programmatic is easy for agency groups,” Crawford says. “Non-programmatic in-store media is not. Retailers have to build the pipes that allow their inventory to be discovered, planned and transacted through the systems agencies already use.”

Without that, commerce media risks recycling the same budgets rather than unlocking new ones. “If we don’t make it easy,” he says, “incremental money won’t come into the industry.”

This is also where AI starts to matter – not as hype, but as plumbing. “Retail media is still a very people-heavy business,” Shayer says. “It doesn’t scale by just adding headcount. AI helps automate the hardest parts – faster planning, real-time optimization, adapting creative to context like weather or events.”

The deeper shift, though, is cultural. “There’s much more openness to partnership now,” he says. “Retailers are realizing they can’t build everything themselves. They need orchestration rather than ownership.”

For US retailers, the message is becoming unavoidable. Digital commerce media alone will not deliver the next phase of growth. That growth sits in stores – messy, physical, inconsistent, and still profoundly under-engineered.

As Shayer puts it: “Any touchpoint that links back to a point of purchase can be retail media. In that sense, all media is retail media – and all retail media is just media.”

The next chapter of commerce media won’t be won by shouting louder about digital sophistication. It will be won by retailers finally taking the store seriously – not as a relic, but as the hardest and most valuable part of the system.

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