It’s time to prove retail media’s real impact – or risk losing budget
Retail media is evolving fast and proving incrementality is now mission critical. Matthew McGinley, head of CPG and retail at Uber Advertising, argues here that brands must act now to measure true impact and win back their share of shrinking marketing budgets.
Retail media has quickly become one of the hottest conversations in marketing circles – and with good reason. As retail platforms scale, and first-party data becomes more powerful in a privacy-conscious world, brands have flocked to retail media with big expectations.
But despite the hype, one critical question has lingered beneath the surface: how do we know what actually is working?
For years, the challenge of proving incrementality – genuine, net-new impact driven by retail media – has dogged the category. Too often, ad exposure has been conflated with effectiveness. Number of impressions, not the lasting impression made.
