Retail media has an attribution problem masquerading as an efficiency win.
Agency leaders at DBMS recently argued retail media should be planned beyond the lower funnel. The ambition is right, but the measurement architecture is broken.
Most brands treat retail media like a vending machine: spend goes in, credited sales come out, and a siloed ROAS gets celebrated.
That creates two severe blind spots:
The Demand Harvester
Retail media takes 100% credit for a conversion that upper-funnel TV or social built over months. It looks hyper-efficient while mostly capturing baseline demand.
The Hidden Multiplier
Retail media sparks discovery and lifts non-retail search or direct DTC traffic, but receives zero credit. You end up slashing a budget that was quietly amplifying other channels.
Both lead to bad capital allocation.
Media isn't a collection of isolated line items.
It's an interconnected ecosystem.
Modern measurement requires a system of simultaneous equations:
Model multi-stage responses together: Track awareness, search, site traffic, and retail checkout in parallel.
Quantify inter-channel interactions: Let channels lift each other inside the model rather than compete for a single conversion.
Separate creation from capture: Validate incremental demand with geo-lift experiments and holdouts.
Closed-loop retail data is powerful, but it only records what happens inside the retailer's walls.
Retail media isn't strictly an upper or lower funnel play. it's a node in a dynamic media system, and our econometrics must reflect that.
What is your team doing to measure retail media's halo on non-retail channels?
Cheers
Todd
Responding to Agency execs call for retail media to be holistically considered beyond the lower funnel, Digiday