What the standard addresses.
Brands operating across multiple retail media networks face a measurement environment in which the same campaign, measured against the same underlying transaction data, can produce iROAS values that vary by 6.5x and flip the directional result in 83% of cases depending solely on the methodology applied (Albertsons Media Collective, Ovative, Northwestern Kellogg, 2026).
This is not a vendor-quality problem. Every named methodology in current use can be defended as internally rigorous. The variance arises because the field has not converged on shared definitions of the underlying concepts — what counts as exposure, what counts as the counterfactual, what window measurement should span, what attribution rule to apply.
The DCRI Retail Media Measurement Standard does not claim to be the only correct methodology. It specifies the minimum methodological floor below which a vendor's reported numbers should not be considered comparable to other vendors' reported numbers. The standard covers iROAS, incremental sales lift, new-to-brand, halo, ROAS, and the disclosure requirements that make cross-network comparability possible.
Scope of v1.0.
Onsite and offsite retail media measurement where the retailer's first-party transaction data is the outcome signal. In-store measurement is out of scope for v1.0. Brand-lift, awareness, and third-party-cookie-based open-web measurement are out of scope.
Governance.
The standard is governed by the DCRI Standards Board, an independent body of named members.
Composition principles: the board is designed for cross-stakeholder representation across measurement methodology, buyer-side measurement, retail media operations, privacy and legal counsel, and adjacent standards bodies. No single parent organization holds majority influence. No board member votes on certification decisions affecting their employer. The board chair convenes the work and does not vote on certification.
Full governance details — board size, term length, selection procedures, and the conflict-of-interest policy — will be published with the founding cohort.
Status and timeline.
Founding board recruitment is in progress.
The published v0.1 will carry the founding board's names on the cover and will resolve the seven methodological questions the working scaffold leaves open.
The v1.0 publication, planned for 2026, follows a 60-day public comment period on v0.1 and becomes a DCRI-Certified standard against which methodologies can be audited.
Relationship to other standards bodies.
The standard is designed to extend, not compete with, existing work. It adopts MRC viewability requirements as the floor for exposure measurement, IAB Tech Lab's PAIR 1.1 as the identity-matching protocol for cross-platform measurement, IAB Tech Lab's ADMaP 1.0 as the attribution data mapping for cross-publisher measurement, and IAB Tech Lab's Data Clean Room Guidance v1.0 as the framework for clean-room-based measurement.
DCRI intends to seek a formal memorandum of understanding with IAB Tech Lab establishing the standard as the operational and conformance layer above IAB Tech Lab's specification layer.
Licensing.
The standard will be published openly under Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0. Methodology vendors are free to reference, extend, and critique it. They may not represent uncertified methodologies as DCRI-Certified.
How to participate.
Measurement methodology authors, RMN operators, CPG measurement leads, privacy counsel, and academics with peer-reviewed work in retail media measurement, attribution, or incrementality are invited to express interest in board participation or working-group contribution. Email info@dcrinstitute.org.