Do you know how incremental the growth from your retail media really is?
Our Founder Alex Tait asked a Commerce Media* panel at New Digital Age’s Foresight event a few weeks ago whether they’d steal a march on their Retail Media counterparts by embracing a more transparent approach to data.
We weren’t knocked off our seats by the enthusiastic response. I suppose we can understand the reticence in a public forum to make such a declaration without having “aligned” with internal teams. And to be fair to the panellists, one of them promised afterwards privately to come back to him with some considered thoughts on how feasible that would be for their proposition.
However, the opportunity for them (as well as retail media networks more generally) is real.
Our friends at the advertiser trade body ISBA recently published a blog discussing some of the wider issues brands come across with retail media measurement.
We like a knotty measurement problem at Entropy and we’ve been pioneering measuring retail media via MMM over the last few years. However, we’d constructively build on ISBA’s call for better data to be made available consistently for use in Marketing Mix Modelling.
There are various reasons why some retail media providers don’t share performance data or data that can be used to measure the true incremental impact of brands’ spend. It might impact a wider relationship (or Joint Business Plan as FMCGs call their commercial relationship with retailers). It has long been a grumble that FMCG eCommerce teams have had over the years about the lack of transparency in some aspects of those relationships.
Yet the largest retail media provider by spend, Amazon, has been leading the way in terms of MMM by providing access to its MMM feed. You can read about how we worked with Amazon to be one of the first companies to measure incrementality via MMM on their platform here.
If you’ve worked with retail media measurement you’ve likely experienced similar measurement challenges. This complexity doesn’t eliminate the need for rigorous measurement – it makes transparent, consistent metrics more essential.
We believe that Retail Media Networks that embrace this sort of measurement transparency won’t disadvantage themselves – they’ll position for sustainable growth. As CFO scrutiny intensifies, platforms demonstrating clear, verifiable incremental impact will win budget allocation.
The goal is consistency that enables retail media to be evaluated as part of an integrated marketing strategy, with the same rigour expected from other channels.
We will continue to work with the industry into 2026 to lobby for best in class data for incremental measurement to be available for MMMs.
*Commerce media is a term commonly being applied to non-retailers looking to monetise their proposition in a similar way e.g. trainline and Expedia.
