Retail Media Insights

Is ROAS the right metric for RMNs? Retail Media Networks (RMNs) have outgrown their early days when untapped demand meant every dollar spent was both high-ROAS and high-incrementality. Today, focusing solely on ROAS incentivizes behaviors that may appear efficient but harm long-term profitability and growth. Here’s how ROAS can be gamed—and why it’s problematic: 1️⃣ Over-spending on Retargeting or Brand Keywords. These tactics drive high ROAS but focus on customers who were likely to convert anyway, resulting in low incremental growth. 2️⃣ Discount-Driven Sales. Discounting boosts ROAS by generating short-term revenue but lowers margins, attracts low-LTV customers, and conditions buyers to expect promotions. 3️⃣ Cutting Spend on High-Incrementality Campaigns. Investing in new customer acquisition or brand building may have lower ROAS but drives long-term growth and quality customer cohorts. These behaviors lead to: ⛔️ Shrinking new customer cohorts. ⛔️ Increased reliance on discounts, reducing margins. ⛔️ Lower customer lifetime value (LTV) and diminished profitability over time. In essence, chasing ROAS at all costs leads to slower growth and declining margins—a losing combination for any business. Efficiency metrics like ROAS are necessary but must be balanced with an effectiveness metric that focuses on long-term outcomes. For example: ✅ 180-Day Contribution LTV: Measure the total revenue contribution from full-price customers acquired over six months. ✅ Incremental Revenue from Non-Brand Keywords: Track revenue generated from truly new demand sources. ROAS is an excellent efficiency metric but a poor north star. Striking the right balance between efficiency and effectiveness will ensure your business scales sustainably while maintaining margins. Keen to hear what other metrics are used for RMNs #advertising #media #tech

If more of your store sales start on TikTok lately, you might wanna read this. 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘢𝘭𝘦 𝘪𝘴 𝘥𝘦𝘤𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘥 𝘣𝘦𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘦 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘤𝘶𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘳 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘯 𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘦. The checkout happens in-store. But the sale happens everywhere else. Here's the reality: This year 60%+, and in 2027, 70% of retail sales will be digitally influenced. I can't emphasize this enough; here's what most brands miss—digital influence isn't just about online sales. It's about shaping every moment before the customer even walks into your store. L'Oréal cracked this code: 100M+ AR try-on sessions driving real conversions. 31 brands orchestrating seamless experiences across 72 countries. No.1 in beauty influencer marketing (29% market share), 20-80% higher conversion rates through enhanced digital experiences. The new customer journey isn't linear—it's layered: - They discover you on social - Research you through reviews and UGC - Try your product virtually through AR - Get retargeted with personalized content - Finally purchase in-store (feeling confident they're making the right choice) Every touchpoint matters, and every interaction influences the final decision. The brands winning today aren't just selling products—they're orchestrating experiences across owned, paid, and earned media that guide customers from curiosity to checkout. Digital discovery is increasingly pay-to-play and shoppers are paying attention. ++ Tactical Recommendations for CPG / FMCG Brands ++ 1. Beyond just having perfect, high SOV product pages, create discovery ecosystems. - Optimize for "zero-moment-of-truth" searches. - Activate shoppable content at scale. - Leverage user-generated content as social proof. Brands that do these see a 35% higher conversion rate from digital touchpoints to in-store purchases. 2. Connect digital engagement directly to retail execution. - Geo-target digital campaigns to drive foot traffic - Create "store-specific" digital content CPG brands using geo-targeted social ads see a 23% higher in-store sales lift in targeted markets. 3. Most important one; stop flying blind—measure digital influence on offline sales. - Implement unique promo codes for each digital touchpoint to track conversion paths. - Use customer surveys at point of purchase. - Partner with retailers on shared data insights Brands with proper attribution see 15-25% improvement in marketing ROI within 12 months. 𝗧𝗼 𝗮𝗰𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗶𝗻𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁𝘀 𝗳𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗼𝘄 ecommert® 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗷𝗼𝗶𝗻 𝟭𝟰,𝟲𝟬𝟬+ 𝗖𝗣𝗚, 𝗿𝗲𝘁𝗮𝗶𝗹, 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗠𝗮𝗿𝗧𝗲𝗰𝗵 𝗲𝘅𝗲𝗰𝘂𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲𝘀 𝘄𝗵𝗼 𝘀𝘂𝗯𝘀𝗰𝗿𝗶𝗯𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗺𝗲𝗿𝘁® : 𝗖𝗣𝗚 𝗗𝗶𝗴𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗹 𝗚𝗿𝗼𝘄𝘁𝗵 𝗻𝗲𝘄𝘀𝗹𝗲𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿. #CPG #FMCG #AI #ecommerce Procter & Gamble PepsiCo Unilever The Coca-Cola Company Nestlé Mondelēz International Kraft Heinz Ferrero Mars Colgate-Palmolive Henkel Bayer Haleon Kenvue The HEINEKEN Company Carlsberg Group Philips Samsung Electronics Panasonic North America

You might know Liquid I.V. for their saves-the-day electrolyte mixes, but we know them for something else...being savvy about measuring the omnichannel impact of their marketing. For example: Liquid I.V. sells their products on their DTC site and Amazon, and they had a hunch Meta ads were driving conversions across all sales channels, but were having a tough time measuring it with the available data. To quantify the omnichannel impact from Meta ads, they ran an incrementality test with Haus. The treatment group received Meta ads while the holdout group did not – enabling Liquid I.V. to measure outcomes that happened because of Meta ads against outcomes that would have happened anyway. The experiment revealed that Meta ads drove: - A 4.95% lift in total Amazon sales - A 10% lift in DTC orders off Liquid I.V.’s website Huge 👏 to the forward thinking team of Brooke Cullison and Aaron Jones at Liquid I.V. and our partners Stephen S.., Laura Floyd, Max Gillette (Almqvist), Alan Durkin, and Anne Qin at Meta for their work on this. Link to the full case study in the comments!

#Amazon Growth Isn’t About Spending More, It’s About Spending Smarter. We recently completed a full-scale Amazon audit for a retail brand, and what we uncovered echoes what we’ve seen time and again: Many brands treat Amazon like a media platform. The winning brands treat it like a growth engine. 1. Ad Efficiency ≠ Account Efficiency Many brands have healthy ROAS on paper and think they are doing "great", but are unknowingly cannibalizing organic sales or overspending on branded terms. We deploy a layered campaign architecture that separates acquisition from retention, brand defense from conquesting, so every dollar has a distinct job and measurable impact. 2. Smart Media Spend Should Build Organic Equity Media shouldn’t be a crutch! In most audits, we find that ad budgets are overly concentrated on driving short-term ROAS, with little consideration for long-term keyword rank. Our approach strategically uses paid media to lift visibility on high-opportunity keywords, driving sustained organic growth. This way, over time, you reduce dependency on paid spend as your products begin to win share of voice organically. 3. Product Investment Should Match Lifecycle, Not Just Performance Too often, budgets are allocated based on yesterday’s result, not tomorrow’s opportunity. We utilize a quadrant model to assess each SKU’s role in the portfolio and allocate investment to products with headroom, seasonality, and strategic significance. 4. Content = Conversion Power Every asset (title, bullet, image) either builds trust or creates friction, and with Amazon’s shift to AI-driven and semantic search (hello, #Rufus), PDP content isn’t just SEO, it’s how your brand shows up and gets discovered. Optimizing titles, bullets, and imagery for consumer psychology and Amazon’s evolving algorithm increases visibility, click-through, and conversion in one unified motion. 5. Retail Media Should Power a Full-Funnel Strategy If your strategy begins and ends with Sponsored Products, you're leaving growth on the table. We connect #AMC, DSP, and real-time bidding to move beyond #ROAS, targeting new-to-brand customers, building loyalty loops, and optimizing to LTV, not just last click. Oh, and we track profit like a hawk! Top-performing Amazon programs are integrated, not siloed. They align retail readiness, media, creative, and data into one feedback loop that compounds over time. If you're rethinking how Amazon fits into your broader marketing strategy, I'm happy to have a conversation. If you know me, then you know - no pitch, just perspective.

TikTok Shop is not messing around. At Spree, we're building a shoppable video platform, but also a studio where we help brands and creators onboard, market, and sell through social platforms. Think of it like influencer marketing in a post-cookie world: full funnel from awareness to purchase, but all in one short-form video. Recently, our TikTok Shop partnership has been getting a lot of love. A few interesting learnings from this holiday season: 1. 'Viral' products are a shortcut. We uploaded one 'viral product' into the system and started getting sales before we posted our first video. Naturally, we ordered a few hundred more ASAP. 2. TikTok Shop success aligns closely with the rules of great influencer marketing. Get a creator with an engaged, lean-in audience. Find a product they actually like that their audience will actually like. Sell by telling a story, not by telling viewers to buy. 3. Most brands want to be on TikTok Shop but don't know how. It's complex. But once you've done it dozens of times (per day, in our case) it moves fast. I don't care if you're a mom and pop stationary shop, a creator merch brand, or a Fortune 500: you want to experiment here with a team who knows this market. 4. Live is great, but don't sleep on shoppable VOD. A perfect 30 second video of a product can do the work of a one hour live stream. Both are valuable, but too many people are talking about live shoppable and not enough are talking about shoppable shortform. 5. Trends + Product = Sales. Wednesday Addams' dance is popping? Sell the costume. King Bach flashlight dance is trending? Sell the flashlight. Spotify Wrapped is everywhere? Sell headphones. 6. Creators beware: not all audiences want this. If you make gold digger prank content, don't start selling The Feminine Mystique hardcover. If you are a creator and want to try it, make great content first and let a brand ride along. 7. Create like a creator. This is the rule for every brand on every social platform, but certainly pertains here. Don't do one tentpole shoppable live stream on TikTok and judge TT Shop on that. You need to habituate your audience, build a format, and keep it entertaining. In case you can't tell, this is addicting for a social media wonk like me. Smart influencer marketers are already testing this market understanding it will be a huge part of their ecommerce future. And those who haven't need to start today. #ecommerce #creatoreconomy #tiktok https://lnkd.in/e926z8zm

Is Your Retail Media Spend Paying Off? Spoiler: Probably Not. Here’s the cold truth—brands are pouring more money into retail media, but ecommerce sales are not keeping pace. Sound familiar? When I talk to brands, the question is always the same: “How do I make retail media spend actually work for me?” Yes, optimizing retail media is hard. It's handling: 🔵 Thousands of keywords to bid on 🔵 Visibility into share of voice, inventory, and other metrics across hundreds of SKUs 🔵 Constantly changing competitor pricing & promotions The only feasible solution: Driving Incrementality with AI The key is to collect and normalize digital shelf, inventory, sales and campaign data from various retailers and then unleash the power of AI. Then, you’re not just automating—you can predict where every dollar should go based on daily changing metrics like share of search, Inventory availability, and competitor promotions. No more guesswork or experts opining on strategies. AI lets you dominate—whether that means crushing the competition in key categories, driving profitability, or taking over new segments. And it adapts in real time. Brands that embrace AI-driven optimization that drives #incrementality will be the ones to win the next wave of #ecommerce. Those that stick to manual, inefficient approaches will lose out to the competition. Retail media is changing fast, and if you're not innovating now, you're already out of the game. I’d love your comment on how your brand is handling the rising costs of retail media. #RetailMedia #AI #incrementality #GoalBasedOptimization

Your companies bureaucracy is limiting your creator communities performance and killing your bottom line. Most DTC brands only capture 1/3 of the value by only focusing on affiliate revenue. But creator communities drive full funnel performance, support brand goals, and performance goals. When you have 300+ pieces of content being posted monthly from your community: - New TOF channel that is getting your brand in front of new audiences at $2-$5 CPM - 50+ UGC/whitelisting ads you can test to scale paid media - Incremental revenue from affiliates - Halo effect, you'll see a 15% bump in amazon revenue + 70% more revenue thats captured on DTC outside of your last click attribution window. - Improved peak moments/ campaigns by having an army of creators posting about your biggest promos and marketing moments. Is your organizational structure killing your creator ROI? Creator initiatives often underperform when trapped in silos. Affiliate teams focus solely on revenue, brand teams on creative/awareness, and growth teams on conversion. This fragmented approach limits the true potential of creator partnerships. The solution? Reposition creator communities as a cross-functional asset that delivers value across multiple marketing objectives and departments. Our Process: 1. Map community benefits to key stakeholder objectives. Get everyone in a room and educate the team on the cross-functional value they are sitting on. Align creator activities with goals for brand, growth, and performance teams. 2. Establish clear measurement benchmarks. Do deep discovery on what metrics matter most to each team. Ex: New customer revenue, brand lift, CPM, impressions/engagement, and Meta CAC/ROAS. 3. Create cross-functional workflows Develop systems to leverage creator content across channels, from social media, and paid ads. This maximizes the impact of each piece of content. This can be as simple as a spreadsheet that's shared with media buying teams with links to organic creative that can be run as an ad. 4. Report on holistic ROI and share it with all teams. Make each department the hero by providing them a report on performance that supports their goals. By breaking down silos and repositioning creator communities as a value add for the entire business, brands can unlock significantly higher ROI from their partnerships. It's time to stop limiting creators to a single department and start leveraging their full potential across your organization.

Most brands think they need creators for brand affinity, endorsements, and reach. That’s good and right. But when you treat creators as a utility, you unlock exponentially more value. Think of them as targeted amplifiers — distilling your broad message into hyper-specific content for niche audiences, locations, use cases, and retailers. So the WINNING strategy is: Pair macro-influencer activations (akin to celebrity endorsements) with UGC-powered ad creative. Why are creators the best tool for niche targeting at scale? Social proof works — even from strangers. When someone resembles your audience, their recommendation carries weight. Video delivers everything in 30 seconds: social proof, education, demonstration, and brand messaging tailored to an individuals. Whether that person shops Kroger vs. Walmart, lives in Santa Fe vs. Detroit, or are students vs. parents — creators are a tool you can use to speak their language. I've found that digitally native / DTC brands usually excel building a well oiled UGC machine. Retail brands struggle here. If you’re a retail brand looking to crack this code, let’s chat 💌

How do you measure incrementality? 🧩 Every brand asks: did my media actually drive sales beyond what would have happened anyway? Here are three of the most effective approaches in play today: 📊 Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs / A/B Tests) The cleanest measure of causal lift by splitting audiences into exposed vs. control. Still the gold standard, but scaling across hundreds of supplier campaigns is tough. 🗺️ Matched Market / Geo Experiments Turn media on in one region or store set, and off in another. Highly effective for brick-and-mortar, but sensitive to local dynamics like competitor promos or seasonality. 🧪 Synthetic Controls When true RCTs are not possible, synthetic controls create a statistical twin of the exposed group by weighting historical sku, sales, loyalty, and category data. This lets retailers simulate what performance would have been without media. 📈 Effective for enterprise networks running many campaigns at once 👥 Useful for comparing audience tiers such as new-to-brand, loyal, or lapsed 📊 More reliable than simple pre/post because it adjusts for seasonality and baseline shifts ⚖️ The right approach depends on balancing rigor, cost, and scalability. Without incrementality, retail media risks losing credibility and budget share. https://lnkd.in/egquzpJ8

Meta, Google, TikTok, and other ad channels are misleading you. Third-party attribution tools like Triple Whale and North Beam aren't better—they’re flawed too. Tracking has always relied on estimated models, not hard numbers. After iOS 14, tracking became harder, leading to a surge in third-party solutions. But these also provide conflicting data, making it tough to find the truth. So, what is the truth? The only reliable way to measure your marketing efforts is through incrementality tests. These tests answer the question, "What if this channel or ad never existed?" By showing ads to one group and withholding from another, you can measure the true impact on revenue and profit. For example, if you're running Facebook ads and selling on Shopify and Amazon, incrementality tests reveal how Facebook ads impact Amazon sales. Without the initial Facebook touchpoint, an Amazon purchase might not have happened, even though traditional attribution wouldn’t show this. This is why ROAS and third-party attribution aren’t accurate. They use models that can be thwarted by privacy settings and cross-channel purchases. By running incrementality tests, you discover the true impact of your marketing efforts. We ran a 14-day Meta holdout test and found that zip codes shown ads generated 50% more Amazon revenue than those not shown ads, despite sending traffic to Shopify. Now is the perfect time to run these tests. Q3 is calm, free from major holidays that skew results. This is your chance to optimize before Q4. If your brand generates seven figures annually, this should be a top priority to grow profits in Q4.