What North America Can Learn From Europe’s Retail Media Playbook

Despite being around since 2012 when Amazon.com launched Amazon Ads, retail media is still evolving and different regions have approached it from different angles. While North America has scaled fast, it has also accumulated complexity: stitched-together stacks, negotiated measurement instead of designed frameworks, and a heavy tilt toward search as the default growth engine.

Europe offers a different lens. Instead of chasing scale at any cost, it has built retail media around shopper value, in-store strength, and interoperable infrastructure. That’s not just a European advantage — it’s a road map North American retailers can and should use to evolve.

The US Experiment: Lessons in Scale and its Limits

North America proved two things at once: retail media can grow at lightning speed, and unchecked growth can fragment teams, tools and budgets. The result? More “spots,” less orchestration. Advertisers face a maze of dashboards, no unified workflow, and inconsistent standards. That path is profitable, but it limits long-term scalability.

If North America only optimizes search, it risks missing the bigger win: orchestrating outcomes across the full retail journey.

Why Europe’s Foundation Matters

Europe didn’t start with pixels on a site. It operationalized in-store first: scaled signage and digital out-of-home (DOOH), invested in demos and sampling, and treated physical retail as a media channel. Loyalty programs were designed to deepen customer relationships and not just extract data. The result? A model that’s inherently omnichannel, shopper-centric, and more naturally aligned with standards.

That foundation makes Europe a testing ground for retail media 3.0 and gives North America a chance to leap ahead by adopting the right lessons.

4 Lessons North American Retailers Should Apply Now

1. Orchestrate outcomes, not placements. Plan, buy, and measure across onsite, offsite, in-store, and CTV in one workflow. Reporting should tell a single story, not generate a stack of CSVs.
2. Build for clarity. Fewer tools, more interoperability. Agree on shared standards — taxonomy, identity, incrementality — so advertisers spend more time investing and less time reconciling.
3. Protect and expand loyalty. Treat loyalty as a relationship, not a faucet for data. Use retail media to add value for members through recognition, utility and benefits, which then grows data organically.
4. Own the advertiser relationship. Partners help, intermediaries complicate. Retailers that control the brief, the plan, and the proof protect both differentiation and economics.

What Success Looks Like (Beyond ROAS)

• Shopper value: measurable improvements in convenience, relevance and savings.
• Connected reach: verified cross-channel frequency management across store and digital.
• Buyer simplicity: faster launches, faster reporting, higher repeat rates.

The Opportunity for North America

North America doesn’t need to copy Europe’s playbook, but it should learn from it. The U.S. market has unmatched scale, but Europe shows how to balance scale with simplicity, interoperability, and loyalty.

The opportunity now is watch-learn-build: borrow the lessons, skip the legacy, and design a system that serves shoppers, brands and retailers alike. If North America applies these lessons, it won’t just catch up to Europe, it will set the next global standard.

Drew Cashmore is chief strategy officer at Vantage and a longtime retail media strategist. He helped build Walmart’s omni-channel retail media businesses in Canada and the U.S. and now advises retailers globally on designing customer-centric, omni-channel retail media models.