After attending CES and NRF back to back, one thing stood out clearly: in-store retail media isn’t broken — but it isn’t moving in a straight line either.

CES shows the most polished version of retail media. It’s where you hear about scale, incrementality, and maturity. This year, Walmart talked about incrementality in sponsored search, and Albertsons talked about bringing incrementality into in-store measurement. It’s a confident, investor-facing story that signals retail media is growing up.

NRF, on the other hand, is messier — and that’s where it gets interesting.

Walking the NRF show floor after CES made it obvious that not every retailer can, or should, follow the same path as the largest players. Instead of a single model, NRF surfaces a range of approaches: different screen types, hardware setups, sensing technologies, and software layers, many designed for retailers with very different constraints.

Looking back, much of the early in-store retail media experimentation focused on bespoke, over-instrumented experiences. Front-facing cameras, lift-and-learn installations, and custom cabinetry funded by brands. Those approaches can work well for premium, high-intent use cases — but they’re expensive, hard to swap, and difficult to scale.

As we’ve discussed on the podcast before, some of these approaches pulled back not because the technology failed, but because the market wasn’t ready. Media buyers weren’t asking for that level of complexity, and retailers were cautious about shopper experience, privacy, and operations.

A recurring theme — including conversations like the Stratacache panel — is the importance of starting with the job to be done. In many cases, effective in-store media doesn’t require a lot of technology. Placement, context, and creative quality often matter more.

At the same time, NRF hinted at emerging layers around measurement, sensing, and screen quality that aren’t fully ready yet, but point to where things may go next.

The future of in-store retail media will be defined by how well retailers balance engagement, measurement, and the realities of moving shoppers through physical stores.

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