The future of retail media lies not in chasing last-click conversions, but in building lasting brand loyalty through full-funnel measurement and strategic collaboration.
Over the past few years, retail media has been the fastest-growing channel in digital advertising. Once focused on monetizing digital shelf space, this has grown into a $60 billion U.S. market in 2025, projected to reach around $100 billion by 2028, according to a report from eMarketer. But the growth curve is flattening, with the same analysis showing long-term forecasts revised down from 20% in 2024 to 14% annually through 2028. This deceleration reflects more than market maturation. It signals advertisers shifting from buying audience access to demanding accountability and measurable business outcomes.
Yet this demand for accountability exposes a critical gap: Most retailers lack the measurement infrastructure to prove retail media's true impact. Incisiv's 2025 State of Digital Grocery report reveals that less than 30% of grocers can effectively connect their media investments to business outcomes beyond immediate sales. Without sophisticated measurement models, retail media remains a tactical play rather than the strategic relationship-building platform it could become.
The Measurement Gap
Retail media's rapid growth has exposed a fundamental weakness: measurement systems are built for transactions, not relationships. Metrics like Click-Through Rate (CTR) and Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) miss retail media's unique advantage: building brand affinity across the entire customer journey.
Three Structural Barriers Holding Measurement Back
- Attribution Errors: Rich first-party sales data remains underused due to outdated attribution models originating in display advertising. These frameworks fail when customers move between digital and physical touchpoints over weeks before purchasing. Without a unified customer attribution model, brands often overspend in saturated channels while missing emerging opportunities.
- A Funnel Split in Two: Retail media now influences entire customer journeys—from awareness to loyalty—but is still judged on immediate sales outcomes. Brand investments have shifted toward long-term goals like consideration and affinity, yet measurement remains rooted in conversions. This disconnect undervalues campaigns that build intent over time, limiting retail media to short-term sales rather than sustained brand growth.
- Silos That Break the Loop: Media, loyalty, and merchandising teams operate in isolation, with disconnected data systems. This fragmentation prevents tracking how media exposure translates into retention, larger baskets, or brand loyalty—undermining retail media's potential for long-term customer value.
Retail Media Value Engine
Overcoming attribution errors, funnel fragmentation, and operational silos requires more than patchwork fixes—it demands a new model for measuring success. That model must shift the focus from transactions to customer progression, aligning metrics with relationship-building, not just ad performance.
The following four actions represent the foundational shifts needed to build a modern, loyalty-centric measurement infrastructure:
Close the Loop Across Channels
Modern shoppers bounce between digital touchpoints and physical stores, but most attribution models fail to connect ad exposures to actual purchases—especially in-store. This measurement gap means brands lose visibility precisely when customers complete their buying journey.
The solution requires two fundamental capabilities. First, closed-loop attribution, which ties every impression and click to real sales outcomes across all channels, integrating SKU-level sales data to create a unified performance view. Second, incrementality testing, which helps isolate the true impact of a campaign by comparing outcomes between exposed and unexposed audiences. It enables marketers to prove whether ads actually caused a lift in behavior—turning correlation into actionable causation.
When unified attribution and incrementality testing work together, retail media transforms from a reporting exercise into a continuous engine for strategic growth. Brands can finally identify which campaigns drive real business value and invest accordingly—turning measurement from an afterthought into their competitive advantage.
Unlock Full-Funnel Value
Retail media is no longer confined to bottom-funnel performance. Today, it plays a strategic role across the entire customer journey—from building brand awareness to driving conversion and loyalty. Yet many networks still rely on conversion-only metrics, limiting visibility into how brand and consideration efforts contribute to results.
A case in point: Mondelez partnered with Walmart Connect to run full-funnel campaigns during key seasonal moments, optimizing onsite strategy to drive unit velocity and market share. The result was a 53% increase in ad-attributed sales and a 29% lift in incremental ROI—clear proof that orchestrated execution can drive measurable, cross-journey growth
One way to enable this at scale is through Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA). MTA distributes credit across all campaign touchpoints, helping marketers understand how awareness, consideration, and activation tactics work together to drive outcomes. It enables smarter budget allocation by revealing not just what worked—but how and when. However, MTA depends on a unified measurement infrastructure; without it, even advanced models can produce misleading results.
Integrate Retail Media into Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM)
Retail media has grown from a test budget line into a core media investment—but too often, it’s still measured in silos. That’s a missed opportunity.
To unlock its strategic value, brands must integrate retail media into Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM)—a proven, channel-agnostic method that evaluates how various levers (media, pricing, promotions, seasonality) contribute to business outcomes. MMM doesn’t just track clicks or conversions; it quantifies incremental sales impact and isolates retail media’s true influence within the broader marketing ecosystem.
This context is key, enabling marketers to understand how digital exposures drive offline behavior and how brand campaigns contribute to long-term growth—not just short-term transactions. As MMM tools become faster and more granular, many brands now run them weekly or in near real time—giving retail media a dynamic seat at the planning table.
The advantage? When retail media earns its place alongside TV, search, and promotions, it transforms from a tactical performance tool into an essential pillar of modern marketing strategy.
Use Data Clean Rooms for Secure Collaboration
Retail media’s strength lies in its proximity to the shopper—but that strength is limited without trusted data collaboration. Unfortunately, privacy laws and competitive sensitivities prevent retailers and brands from openly sharing granular customer data. This restricts visibility and hampers campaign effectiveness across the funnel.
Enter data clean rooms (DCRs): secure, privacy-compliant environments that allow retailers, brands, and media platforms to work together without exposing personally identifiable information. DCRs enable multiple stakeholders to analyze aggregated, de-identified data collaboratively—unlocking insights that would otherwise remain siloed.
In a recent closed beta, NBCUniversal and Instacart used a clean room to activate campaigns across streaming and linear channels for eight CPG brands—resulting in 8–17x Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), with over a third of buyers being first-time customers. The initiative demonstrates how clean rooms can bridge media and commerce while protecting shopper privacy.
The Growth Reset
Retail media is no longer just about media execution—it’s about driving meaningful business impact. The next phase of growth will not come from more impressions or larger budgets, but from stronger alignment between brands, retailers, and retail media networks around shared goals and measurable outcomes.
To succeed, retail media must evolve from a transactional channel into a connected platform that builds value across every stage of the customer journey. That means shifting focus from what gets clicked to what builds trust, encourages repeat engagement, and deepens loyalty.
This transformation is not just about adopting new tools. It calls for a new mindset—one where retailers become strategic partners, brands prioritize long-term relationships over short-term metrics, and measurement becomes the bridge between activation and growth.
