Retail media is fast becoming a powerful component of the global advertising market, giving brands direct access to consumers close to the point of purchase. But as spending continues to rise, marketers are confronting a growing measurement challenge: proving how much value the channel creates beyond the sales directly attributed to individual retailers.

The concern is becoming more pressing as brands seek to move beyond clicks, conversions and return on advertising spend to establish whether retail media is generating genuine incremental growth across the wider business.

Research highlighted by Circana found that 75 percent of consumer packaged goods retail media campaigns drive impact beyond the initial retailer, while fewer than 20 percent of marketers measure those effects holistically. In one analysis, an online retailer represented 15 percent of total sales but generated 25 percent of total incremental impact, with 75 percent of that impact realised in-store.

The findings underline the complexity of today’s consumer journey. A shopper can discover a product through a retailer’s website, encounter the brand on social media, search for information elsewhere and eventually make a purchase in a physical shop or through another retailer. Yet each platform may measure only the activity occurring within its own environment.

That fragmentation is making the difference between attribution and incrementality increasingly important. Attribution can show that a purchase followed an advertisement, while incrementality seeks to determine whether the advertising created additional business that would not have happened without the investment.

For brands, that distinction can determine whether a campaign genuinely generated new demand or simply received credit for a purchase that was already likely to occur.

The issue connects closely with the views of Marc Pritchard, Chief Brand Officer at Procter & Gamble, who recently discussed marketing effectiveness and the changing media environment on The Effective CMO: Procter & Gamble’s Marc Pritchard, a WARC Podcast hosted by Anna Hamill, Senior Editor at WARC.

Pritchard, whose career at P&G spans more than four decades, said marketing effectiveness ultimately means driving growth and creating value. He explained that P&G assesses brands against five factors: market growth, market share growth, user growth, sales growth and profit growth.

For Pritchard, the approach is less about convincing senior executives that marketing matters and more about demonstrating that marketing investments are producing measurable value for consumers and the business.

His position provides an important lens for the retail media debate. While the channel offers valuable shopper data and a direct connection to commerce, its effectiveness cannot be fully understood through retailer-level sales reports alone.

Pritchard also noted that the fundamentals of brand building have remained largely unchanged despite major shifts in media. P&G’s “who, what, how” framework continues to focus on understanding consumers, identifying their needs, defining the brand’s benefit and delivering that value through the product, communication and retail experience.

What has changed, he said, is how brands deliver those fundamentals. The progression from storefronts and traditional media to television, digital platforms, e commerce and artificial intelligence has produced a far more fragmented