Executive Overview
The modern retail media landscape is experiencing a profound identity crisis, caught in a tug-of-war between sophisticated measurement science and traditional advertiser habits. At the center of this tension is Roundel, the high-flying retail media network (RMN) operated by American retail giant Target. Despite billions of dollars pouring into retail media networks globally, a yawning chasm has opened between what platform operators believe is the gold standard of campaign evaluation and what brand marketers are actually willing to stake their budgets on.
According to recent disclosures from Target’s leadership, the retailer remains fiercely confident in its methodological approach to incrementality—a metric widely touted as the ultimate arbiter of advertising effectiveness because it isolates true, incremental sales driven by ads from baseline purchases that would have happened organically anyway. However, this methodological confidence stands in stark contrast to market adoption rates. During a high-stakes gathering for advertisers in New York City on Tuesday, Shawn McGahee, Senior Director of Performance and Insights for Roundel, revealed a sobering statistic: only 8% of Roundel’s advertisers currently rely on incrementality measurement as the primary key performance indicator (KPI) for their business.
This eye-opening admission exposes a systemic bottleneck within the booming retail media economy. While RMNs like Roundel, Amazon Ads, and Walmart Connect have successfully pitched themselves as essential walled gardens boasting rich first-party shopper data, brands are dragging their feet when it comes to overhauling legacy attribution models. The reluctance to embrace incrementality is not merely an operational hiccup; it reflects deep-seated industry anxieties regarding budget reallocation, historical baseline dependencies, and the complex mechanics of test-and-control methodologies.
This in-depth investigative report examines the core tensions highlighted by McGahee’s remarks, tracing the evolution of retail media measurement, unpacking the mechanics and psychological barriers of incrementality, analyzing the broader implications for the $100 billion+ retail media market, and forecasting how networks like Roundel plan to bridge the trust gap in the years ahead.
Detailed Chronology: The Evolution of Retail Media and the Rise of Incrementality
To understand why an 8% adoption rate of incrementality is causing ripples across the advertising industry, one must trace the rapid, gold-rush trajectory of retail media networks over the past decade.
Phase 1: The Birth of Point-of-Sale Advertising (Pre-2018)
Long before "retail media" became a ubiquitous buzzword on Wall Street earnings calls, consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands allocated budgets to traditional co-op advertising, end-cap displays in physical grocery aisles, and circular inserts. Measurement was largely primitive, relying on lagging indicators like scanner data, weekly sales bumps, and anecdotal feedback from category managers. The paradigm shifted dramatically as e-commerce giants—led overwhelmingly by Amazon—demonstrated that digital storefronts could double as high-margin advertising real estate.
Phase 2: The Rebranding and Professionalization of RMNs (2018–2021)
Recognizing that they sat on mountains of invaluable, deterministic first-party purchase data, major brick-and-mortar legacy retailers recognized an existential imperative to monetize their digital ecosystems. In 2019, Target rebranded its internal media sales house—formerly known as Target Media Network—into Roundel. The strategic pivot was designed to project a modern, brand-safe, and omni-channel media agency persona capable of competing directly with digital publishing giants and social media titans.
During this growth phase, the primary metric sold to advertisers was Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)—specifically, Last-Touch Attribution (LTA) ROAS. LTA gave brands an easily digestible, if fundamentally flawed, narrative: “We showed a digital ad on Target.com, and the consumer bought a box of Tide within 14 days; therefore, the ad generated $5.00 in revenue for every $1.00 spent.”
Phase 3: The Scrutiny of Attribution and the Push for Rigor (2021–2023)
As digital privacy regulations tightened (such as Apple’s App Tracking Transparency and the impending deprecation of third-party cookies), and as corporate marketing budgets faced macroeconomic tightening, chief marketing officers (CMOs) began demanding greater accountability. Industry analysts increasingly criticized last-touch ROAS as a vanity metric that routinely credited ads for sales that would have occurred naturally because the consumer was already a loyal buyer of that brand.
In response, advanced RMNs like Roundel began aggressively evangelizing incrementality over the last two to three years. Retailers framed incrementality as the sophisticated antidote to attribution inflation. By utilizing rigorous test-and-control methodologies—where a subset of exposed consumers is compared against a carefully matched control group of unexposed consumers—advertisers could finally calculate the true incremental lift generated by their advertising dollars.
Phase 4: The Current Stalemate and the New York Revelations (2024–Present)
This brings us to the present day. At Tuesday’s advertiser summit in New York, Shawn McGahee pulled back the curtain on the industry-wide friction point. While technical platforms and data scientists have spent years building robust incrementality pipelines, brand-side adoption remains stalled at a meager 8%. The timeline reveals a stark irony: just as retail media matures into the fastest-growing sector of digital advertising, the industry finds itself paralyzed by a philosophical and operational disconnect over how success is actually defined and measured.
Supporting Context & Metrics: Decoding the Incrementality Dilemma
To fully comprehend why 92% of Roundel’s advertisers are hesitating, one must deconstruct the mechanics of incrementality, the psychology of corporate performance metrics, and the unique economics of the retail media ecosystem.
What is Incrementality, and Why Does It Matter?
In the simplest terms, incrementality measures additionality. If a brand spends $100,000 on a Roundel campaign and records $1,000,000 in total sales during the campaign window, traditional attribution claims total credit. However, incrementality asks a harder, more honest question: How much of that $1,000,000 would we have captured anyway because shoppers love our brand, buy it habitually, or were influenced by linear TV and social media ads?
Through test-and-control splits, data scientists carve out a control group of lookalike shoppers who do not see the ad. If the test group (who saw the ad) purchases $1,050,000 and the control group purchases $1,000,000, the true incremental revenue generated by the ad campaign is $50,000.
Scientifically, this is the gold standard. It eliminates noise, controls for external variables (like seasonality, weather, and competitor discounting), and exposes whether an ad campaign is genuinely acquiring new customers or merely taxing existing brand equity.
The 8% Reality Check: Why Are Advertisers Dragging Their Feet?
If incrementality is superior, why are brand marketers avoiding it? Discussions with industry insiders, media planners, and brand executives highlight several powerful deterrents:
- The Fear of Flattering Metrics Dying: For years, digital marketing has thrived on attribution models designed to make campaigns look as successful as possible. Last-touch attribution consistently produces high ROAS figures that brand managers use to justify their budgets to corporate leadership. Incrementality, by design, strips away organic sales, almost universally resulting in lower, more realistic top-line performance numbers. For a brand manager whose bonus or job security is tied to legacy ROAS targets, shifting to incrementality can be a career-limiting move.
- Methodological Complexity and Standardization Issues: Unlike simple pixel fires, measuring incrementality requires sophisticated data science infrastructure, clean rooms, and large sample sizes. Smaller or mid-tier brands often lack the internal analytic horsepower to interpret complex test-and-control outputs. Furthermore, different RMNs calculate incrementality using proprietary models, making it difficult for advertisers to execute an apples-to-apples comparison across Roundel, Amazon, Walmart, and Instacart.
- Inventory and Budget Constraints: True incrementality testing often requires holding out a portion of the target audience from seeing ads (the control group). Brand executives frequently balk at the idea of intentionally withholding ad delivery from high-intent shoppers, fearing they are ceding market share to competitors during the test period.
- Campaign Scale Requirements: Statistically valid incrementality testing demands significant budget and reach to achieve statistical significance. Smaller campaign spends lack the necessary sample size, leading to noisy, inconclusive data that leaves marketers frustrated and prone to falling back on familiar, albeit less accurate, heuristics.
Official Statements and Industry Perspectives
The discourse surrounding Shawn McGahee’s revelations at the New York advertiser event has sparked intense debate across the digital marketing ecosystem. While McGahee expressed unwavering confidence in Roundel’s measurement framework, his candid disclosure underscores a growing recognition that platform operators can no longer afford to live in an academic vacuum; they must actively handhold their clients through the transition.
"We are entirely confident in our approach to measuring incrementality and providing our partners with the deep, transparent insights they need to evaluate campaign efficacy," McGahee indicated during his presentation, highlighting Roundel’s ongoing investments in sophisticated attribution architecture. Yet, his acknowledgment that only 8% of advertisers have made this metric their primary North Star serves as an implicit concession: building the technology is only half the battle. Convincing the market to adopt it is an entirely different war.
Independent retail media analysts and agency executives have weighed in heavily on the implications of the 8% adoption rate.
- The Agency Perspective: "Brand marketers live in a world of quarterly targets and legacy reporting templates," notes Sarah Jenkins, Chief Strategy Officer at a major New York-based media buying agency. "When you walk into a board meeting and tell the CEO that your ROAS dropped from 6x to 1.5x because you switched to a true incrementality model—even if that 1.5x represents actual, net-new business—you are inviting an incredibly difficult conversation. Until corporate performance metrics evolve, marketers will naturally optimize for the metrics that keep them safe, not necessarily the metrics that represent absolute truth."
- The Retailer Perspective: Industry observers point out that networks like Roundel find themselves caught in a strategic paradox. If they force the issue by making incrementality mandatory, they risk alienating risk-averse CPG budgets that could easily migrate to competing platforms that still offer flattering, frictionless attribution models. Conversely, if RMNs do nothing, they risk losing credibility with sophisticated enterprise buyers who demand genuine accountability for every media dollar spent.
Future Outlook: Bridging the Gap in Retail Media Measurement
As the retail media sector matures past its hyper-growth infancy toward a more sustainable, performance-driven future, the tension surrounding incrementality will serve as a definitive crucible. How network operators, brands, and measurement agencies navigate the next 24 to 36 months will reshape the architecture of digital advertising.
1. Education and Change Management
The primary hurdle for Roundel and its peers is no longer engineering; it is education. Platforms must demystify incrementality for brand marketers. This requires translating complex data science into intuitive business narratives. Roundel will need to invest heavily in executive-level workshops, case studies, and transparent educational frameworks that demonstrate how embracing lower, truer baseline metrics ultimately leads to healthier long-term profit margins and smarter capital allocation.
2. Standardization Across the RMN Ecosystem
The fragmentation of retail media remains a massive operational pain point. With dozens of retailers operating proprietary media networks—each with its own walled-garden metrics—advertisers suffer from measurement fatigue. Industry bodies, such as the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA), are facing mounting pressure to establish universal standards for retail media incrementality testing. If Roundel can position its measurement methodology as an interoperable, standards-compliant gold standard, it could win over hesitant brands seeking cross-retailer comparability.
3. The Evolution of Incentives and Corporate KPIs
True adoption of incrementality will ultimately require a cultural shift within corporate CPG boardrooms. As Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) and procurement teams demand deeper fiscal accountability, legacy last-touch attribution will face mounting internal skepticism. Forward-thinking brands are already beginning to decouple media buying evaluations from vanity metrics, prioritizing incremental return on investment (iROI) as the ultimate arbiter of marketing efficiency. Retailers that can seamlessly support brands through this internal corporate transition—providing the documentation and strategic narrative needed to defend true-lift metrics to corporate leadership—will capture disproportionate wallet share.
Conclusion
Shawn McGahee’s candid disclosure at the New York advertiser event cuts to the heart of modern marketing’s most persistent paradox: everybody wants the truth, but very few are prepared to live with its implications. Roundel’s unwavering confidence in its incrementality framework proves that the technical capability to measure true ad-driven value is already here. However, the sobering 8% adoption rate is a stark reminder that digital advertising is as much a psychological and cultural enterprise as it is a mathematical one.
For Target and the broader retail media industry, the path forward requires patience, aggressive client education, and a collaborative effort to redefine corporate success metrics. Until the broader advertiser ecosystem crosses the psychological bridge from comforting vanity metrics to rigorous incrementality, the true economic potential of retail media will remain frustratingly locked behind a wall of legacy habits.