Which Retail Media Measurement Wave Are You Riding?

Retail media has matured fast. Most brands are active across multiple networks, running always-on programs, and fielding pressure from leadership to prove the investment. What hasn't kept pace, in most cases, is measurement.

That's not a criticism but a reality. The networks have every incentive to give brands data that makes spend look efficient. The question is whether that data tells you what you actually need to know.

How you answer that question (how you measure, what signals you trust, and whether those signals connect to real decisions) is what determines how mature your measurement is. In other words, your measurement approach is your strategic position. 

We think about retail media measurement maturity in three waves.

Wave 1: Platform Attribution

The primary signal is ROAS, as reported by the retail media network, with last-touch attribution as the default. Optimization does happen in near real-time, but it's optimizing toward a metric that can't answer the most important question: would that sale have happened without the ad?

Wave 1 isn't broken, but it is limited. The problem comes when you confuse the data you have with the full picture.

Wave 2: Incrementality Measurement

Wave 2 brands know that RMN-reported ROAS tells an incomplete story. They've run incrementality studies like geo holdouts, matched market tests, media mix models, etc., and they have real evidence of what's working.

But there's a structural gap in Wave 2 that's easy to miss: measuring and decisioning are two different things. Quarterly studies are retrospective by design, and by the time results land, budgets have already moved. The insight is there, but the infrastructure to act on it continuously isn't.

Wave 2 is honest progress, but doesn’t exactly solve the problem. 

Wave 3: Integrated Causal Intelligence

Wave 3 is the shift from incrementality as a study to incrementality as an operating system. The methodology is the same but the cadence is continuous, with results feeding directly into media buying decisions. This is where iROI finally replaces ROAS as the signal driving optimization.

This becomes a structural advantage. Decisions grounded in causal data compound over time. Competitors optimizing against correlated signals keep chasing performance that looks good in dashboards but doesn't hold up in the market.

As SharkNinja’s Vice President of Marketing Analytics Joe Meier told us, "The question we kept coming back to was: are we actually growing, or are we buying sales we would have gotten anyway? We want to optimize to incrementality, and we need to do that at the speed of our business. Having iROI as a continuous signal through Incremental's platform means that we can drive effectiveness and efficiency at scale.”

The next frontier of agentic media buying will require exactly this kind of signal quality to function. Wave 3 brands aren't just ahead now. They're building the infrastructure that matters most next.

So where do you stand?

We built a one-page diagnostic to help brands answer that honestly. It takes about two minutes - access the doc here (no form full required).