Executive Overview
The retail media network (RMN) landscape has experienced an unprecedented era of hyper-growth over the past half-decade. Brands that once allocated the vast majority of their digital advertising budgets to walled-garden search and social giants like Google, Meta, and Amazon have rapidly pivoted toward omnichannel retailers. These brick-and-mortar behemoths hold a golden asset: vast oceans of first-party customer purchase data, loyalty program insights, and closed-loop attribution capabilities. Among the most sophisticated of these retail media operations is Roundel, the in-house media network of retail titan Target.
However, as billions of advertising dollars continue to flow into RMN ecosystems, a profound structural tension has emerged between retail publishers and the brands buying their inventory. At the epicenter of this friction is the debate over performance metrics—specifically, the measurement of incrementality.
For the past several years, retail media executives have aggressively evangelized incrementality as the ultimate holy grail of campaign evaluation. Defined as the measurement of true business lift—calculating the exact sales revenue generated by an ad campaign compared to baseline sales that would have occurred organically without exposure to the advertisement—incrementality goes far beyond traditional, vanity-driven metrics like impressions, clicks, and last-touch attribution. It utilizes rigorous test-and-control methodologies to isolate the true causal impact of marketing spend.
Despite industry-wide advocacy, a stark chasm exists between theory and execution. During a high-profile industry event for advertisers in New York City, Shawn McGahee, Senior Director of Performance and Insights for Roundel, offered a candid and sobering revelation. While expressing absolute confidence in Target’s proprietary approach to calculating and reporting incrementality, McGahee acknowledged a striking industry reality: only 8% of Roundel’s advertisers currently utilize incrementality measurement as the primary key performance indicator (KPI) for their business.
This explosive statistic highlights a fundamental crisis of confidence and operational readiness within the upper echelons of corporate brand marketing. Even as retail media networks mature into indispensable channels, legacy habits, methodological complexities, financial friction, and organizational siloes continue to keep the vast majority of advertisers tethered to legacy attribution models. This in-depth investigative report explores the chronological rise of retail media metrics, examines the structural hurdles preventing widespread incrementality adoption, evaluates official stances from industry leaders, and projects what this 8% adoption rate means for the future of digital advertising.
Detailed Chronology
To fully understand why incrementality remains stuck in the single-digit adoption tier among major brands, it is necessary to trace the historical evolution of retail media measurement over the past decade.
Phase 1: The Wild West of Digital Advertising (Pre-2018)
Long before retail media networks became formalized corporate business units, consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands and non-endemic advertisers purchased digital real estate on retailer websites through rudimentary display and banner ad placements. Measurement during this era was rudimentary at best. Advertisers relied on standard digital metrics—cost-per-click (CPC), click-through rate (CTR), and gross impressions.
These metrics created a false sense of security. A digital ad appearing on a retailer’s homepage might generate millions of impressions, but brands had virtually no visibility into whether those views translated into actual physical baskets purchased down the grocery aisle. Attribution was fragmented, and the correlation between digital ad spend and physical retail point-of-sale data remained largely disconnected.
Phase 2: The Birth of Closed-Loop Attribution (2018–2021)
As Amazon Advertising demonstrated the immense profitability of monetizing retail site traffic, traditional brick-and-mortar retailers realized they were sitting on a goldmine. Target officially launched its rebranded media network, Roundel, in 2019 (evolving from Target In-Store Marketing). Other major players—Walmart, Kroger, and CVS—followed suit, structuring their advertising divisions to leverage proprietary customer loyalty data.
During this second phase, the industry celebrated a major technological breakthrough: closed-loop attribution. For the first time, retailers could directly link a digital ad impression or click on their platform to an actual transaction, whether executed online via store pickup/delivery or offline at a physical cash register. Advertisers rejoiced. Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) could now be calculated with mathematical precision. Brands flooded RMNs with budgets, eager to capture high-intent shoppers at the digital point of purchase.
Phase 3: The Push for Rigorous Accountability (2021–2023)
As retail media budgets ballooned into multi-billion-dollar lines on corporate balance sheets, Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) and Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) began demanding deeper accountability. Traditional closed-loop attribution had a glaring blind spot: correlation does not equal causation.
If a brand advertised coffee on Target’s platform and a loyal consumer bought that coffee, closed-loop attribution gave the ad 100% of the credit. However, what if that consumer bought the exact same coffee every single week regardless of whether they saw an ad? That sale would have happened organically. Traditional metrics failed to account for "organic baseline sales."
Consequently, retail media networks began pushing incrementality testing as the gold standard. By setting up randomized control groups (exposed to ads) versus control groups (suppressed from ads), retailers could isolate true, net-new revenue driven explicitly by the media investment.
Phase 4: The Reality Check and the 8% Revelation (Present Day)
By 2024, incrementality was no longer a fringe concept discussed only by data scientists; it was the focal point of industry panels, trade association whitepapers, and brand-agency negotiations. Yet, practical execution lagged far behind theoretical praise.
At the New York advertiser event, Shawn McGahee pulled back the curtain on Roundel’s internal data. His admission that only 8% of advertisers use incrementality as their primary performance metric sent ripples through the digital marketing community. It marked a critical turning point: the industry had reached an impasse where the technology to measure true business impact existed, but the advertiser base was structurally unprepared to adopt it universally.
Supporting Context & Metrics: Decoding the 8% Adoption Rate
To unpack why 92% of Roundel’s advertisers are failing to make incrementality their primary metric, one must examine the complex web of technical, operational, and financial barriers plaguing the modern brand organization.
1. The Complexity of Test-and-Design Methodology
Unlike a simple click-through rate pulled instantly from a dashboard, true incrementality testing requires sophisticated experimental design. Setting up valid test-and-control groups involves:
- Isolating geographic markets or demographic segments.
- Ensuring sample sizes are statistically significant.
- Controlling for external variables such as seasonality, localized pricing changes, competitor promotions, and supply chain stockouts.
For many brand marketing teams—which are often lean and pressed for time—designing, executing, and auditing these complex experiments requires advanced data science capabilities that simply do not exist in-house.
2. The Fear of Lower Reported ROAS
Perhaps the most powerful psychological and political deterrent to incrementality adoption is the stark reality of what the metric reveals. Traditional closed-loop attribution artificially inflates success by claiming credit for sales that would have happened anyway. When an advertiser transitions to an incrementality-first model, their reported Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) almost always drops.
While a lower incrementality-based ROAS is far more accurate—representing true incremental lift—it can trigger catastrophic internal political fallout. Marketing directors who have spent quarters reporting a 5x ROAS under legacy models are terrified to walk into a boardroom and report a 1.5x true incremental ROAS to skeptical CFOs, even if the latter metric represents real, net-new business growth.
3. Financial and Inventory Opportunity Costs
Running a true incrementality test requires media suppression. To measure what happens without an ad, a retailer must deliberately withhold advertising from a control group of high-intent shoppers. For brands spending millions of dollars on high-demand inventory (such as prime ad space during the holiday shopping season or major tentpole events), the thought of intentionally turning off ads for a subset of potential buyers feels counterintuitive and financially risky. Brands worry about leaving money on the table or losing share of voice to competitors in unsuppressed regions.
4. Attribution Siloes Across Multiple RMNs
Modern CPG brands do not advertise exclusively on Target’s Roundel. They simultaneously run campaigns across Amazon Ads, Walmart Connect, Instacart, and dozens of other niche retail media networks. Each platform uses its own proprietary methodology for calculating incrementality. Because there is currently no universal industry standard or open-source protocol for measuring retail incrementality, brands face an insurmountable data integration challenge. Comparing an incrementality score from Roundel to one generated by Walmart Connect is akin to comparing apples to quantum physics.
Official Statements and Industry Insights
The discourse surrounding Roundel’s data point has ignited a broader industry debate among media executives, retail media architects, and brand side decision-makers.
During his presentation in New York, Shawn McGahee emphasized that Target’s confidence in its measurement framework remains unwavering. He argued that while the 8% adoption figure highlights a hurdle, it also represents a massive educational and operational opportunity for the retail media ecosystem.
"We are entirely confident in the rigor, accuracy, and structural integrity of our incrementality measurement models," McGahee stated to the gathered media buyers and brand executives. "Our tools are built to give brands the unvarnished truth about their return on investment. However, acknowledging that only 8% of our partners rely on this as their primary metric signals that our industry still has significant heavy lifting to do in shifting mindsets, evolving internal reporting structures, and bridging the gap between advanced data science and everyday media execution."
Industry analysts have been quick to weigh in on McGahee’s remarks. Sarah Jenkins, principal retail media analyst at digital commerce consultancy Nexus Insights, noted that the 8% figure should not be interpreted as a failure of Roundel, but rather as an accurate reflection of corporate inertia.
"Brands love to talk about sophistication, transparency, and data-driven maturity in industry panels," Jenkins observed. "However, when you look under the hood of a Fortune 500 CPG brand, their compensation structures, budget allocation cycles, and agency contracts are still entirely tethered to legacy performance indicators like last-touch ROAS and gross impressions. Until corporate Key Performance Indicators and incentive structures are redesigned to reward long-term incremental growth over short-term vanity metrics, that 8% figure will crawl upward at a glacial pace."
Meanwhile, agency leaders have highlighted the tension between retail media networks pushing advanced metrics and brands lacking the analytical infrastructure to process them. Mark Vance, Executive Vice President of Retail Media at a major global holding agency, pointed out that education remains the single greatest bottleneck in the ecosystem.
"Retailers like Target have built Ferrari-level measurement engines," Vance remarked. "The problem is that a lot of brands are still driving with a learner’s permit. When you hand a brand team a complex multi-variable incrementality read, they often don’t know how to translate those insights into budget reallocations. Retailers need to move past simply offering these tools and actively partner with brands to co-manage the cultural and operational change required to use them."
Future Outlook: Navigating the Road Ahead
As the retail media landscape enters its next phase of maturation, the path forward hinges on how publishers, brands, and measurement partners address the incrementality adoption gap. Several critical trends and structural shifts will dictate the future over the next three to five years.
1. Standardization and Interoperability
If the industry is to break past the single-digit adoption barrier, standardization is non-negotiable. Trade organizations such as the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA) are under mounting pressure to establish unified, cross-platform standards for incrementality testing. Until brands can evaluate incrementality through a consistent, apples-to-apples framework across Roundel, Walmart Connect, and Amazon Ads, fragmentation will continue to paralyze adoption.
2. Automation and Simplified Readouts
To drive adoption from 8% to a majority share, retail media networks must democratize and simplify data consumption. Advanced machine learning models and automated reporting dashboards must be deployed to translate complex test-and-control data into actionable, plain-English insights for brand marketers. If a brand manager can view an intuitive, automated dashboard that clearly highlights net-new revenue without requiring a PhD in statistics, internal resistance will dramatically soften.
3. The Evolution of Agency and Brand Incentives
True transformation will require a fundamental rewiring of how marketing agencies and internal brand teams are evaluated and compensated. Brands must transition away from short-term efficiency metrics (such as chasing artificially inflated ROAS figures) and toward effectiveness metrics (such as long-term brand equity and true incremental profit growth). As CFOs become increasingly sophisticated regarding digital ad waste, the demand for true incrementality will ultimately be forced from the top down.
4. Roundel’s Strategic Positioning
For Target and Roundel, navigating this transition presents both a challenge and a distinct competitive advantage. By proactively addressing the measurement gap and investing in educational resources for their advertiser base, Roundel can position itself as a trusted consultative partner rather than merely an ad inventory vendor. Brands that embrace rigorous incrementality measurement today will likely gain a significant competitive edge, optimizing their media spend with surgical precision while their competitors continue to optimize for illusory vanity metrics.
Conclusion
The revelation that only 8% of Roundel’s advertisers rely on incrementality as their primary performance metric serves as a profound wake-up call for the entire digital advertising ecosystem. It bridges the gap between the gleaming marketing narratives of retail media innovation and the gritty, operational realities of corporate brand management.
While the technology required to measure true business lift exists and is rigorously supported by retail publishers like Target, the human, organizational, and methodological hurdles remain formidable. Bridging the gap between an 8% adoption rate and widespread industry reliance will not happen overnight. It will require sustained collaboration, standardization, cultural transformation within brand boardrooms, and a collective industry willingness to embrace uncomfortable truths about what advertising actually achieves. Until then, the holy grail of retail media measurement will remain a tantalizing frontier waiting to be conquered.