A retail media quality checklist that records what was not tested as carefully as what was

Use a retail media quality checklist to record evidence for a particular placement, not to award a general quality badge to a platform. An England retailer needs to know which version was examined, what the reviewer observed and what remains untested before making an operating decision.

This checklist was prepared from public sources on 6 September 2026. Every check below is proposed work unless a separate evidence record shows it was performed. No retailer implementation, campaign or shopper panel was tested for this article.

Identify the assessment object

Enter the property, placement, creative version and environment. Identify the advertiser's approved destination and the relevant catalogue record. State which page conditions are included so another reviewer can distinguish the assessed object from a similar-looking placement elsewhere.

Use evidence states such as observed, unresolved, not tested and excluded with a reason. These are house labels, not standardised grades. A missing record should remain visible rather than being converted into an assumed pass.

Inspect the shopper-facing presentation

Section 2 of the CAP Code provides the advertising-recognition requirement. The inspection questions below translate that issue into proposed evidence requests; they do not prescribe a legally approved design.

• Record how the placement is identified as advertising in the page context.
• Compare the actual creative and destination with the authorised versions.
• Describe any assessed state in which labels, content or layout differ.
• Preserve evidence of the rendered result and identify excluded conditions.

A screenshot may document what a reviewer saw in that state. It cannot demonstrate that shoppers noticed the label or understood the offer. Those claims would need relevant observed user evidence, with a disclosed research method.

Examine the associated data behaviour

The ICO's online advertising page addresses consent for advertising storage and access technologies. Refer the implementation to a competent privacy reviewer with its actual device and supplier data flows.

Ask that reviewer to identify the permission conditions assessed and the evidence for withdrawal handling. Do not infer compliant behaviour from a consent banner's presence. A banner inspection and a downstream processing assessment answer different questions.

If a needed integration cannot be inspected, record the limit and who must obtain further evidence. This method does not authorise live experiments on shoppers or declare a lawful basis for the retailer.

Check what each measurement represents

The May 2026 IAB Europe document separates impression and viewability concepts and addresses attribution. Retain the adopted measurement specification alongside the inspection record.

Ask where an ad request is counted, what establishes rendering and how any visibility measure is collected. Do not reconcile those events by renaming all of them impressions. Document filtering and unavailable observations without inventing a successful-delivery rate.

Keep a credited sale labelled as attributed. A causal outcome requires evidence about what would have happened without the advertising. Neither a completed checklist nor an attribution report supplies that counterfactual by itself.

Make findings usable by the decision-maker

For each unresolved item, state the affected scope, evidence needed and person responsible for obtaining it. Avoid a numerical score that allows unrelated completed checks to conceal an unanswered permission or presentation issue.

The release owner should receive the whole finding record, including exclusions. If a revised build addresses a defect, connect the new observation to that change and identify which earlier findings still apply. Do not erase an earlier failure just because a later version exists.

Complete this checklist with actual observations before using it in a launch discussion. Qualified advertising and privacy review, genuine named authorship and disclosure of publisher relationships remain publication requirements; the desk research presented here provides no compliance or launch verdict.