In case you missed it last week, there's a new beef in marketing. And this one hits close to home.
On August 27, Mark Ritson published a column in ADWEEK called "Don't Let Retail Media Tell You It's Brand Building." His argument: Retail media is "slotting fees with a fancy name and a dashboard." Treat it as a bottom-of-funnel, defensive investment that locks in your distribution, and as the correct new home for trade promotion money. "But don't think — for one moment — that it's brand building."
Now, that's something a lot of us have heard before. But Andrew Lipsman, independent media industry analyst, decided to wade into the muck and fight back. He answered in his own ADWEEK op-ed five days later under the headline "Retail Media Can Build Brands—Including Ways Other Media Can't."
The op-eds are worth reading in their own right, but gloves really came out in the comment sections of a few LinkedIn posts. RMN leaders, CPG marketers, agency strategists and academics, all waded in with their POVs, and few minced their words. Whatever people have been quietly thinking about this, it was time to finally make their thoughts known.
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The devil's in the definition
Ritson's core claim is this: growth comes from building mental availability among people who aren't shopping your category today, and "retail media, by its very definition and operation, reaches the ones who are."
Josh Clarkson, who runs global retail media at Mars, attacked that definition. "What definition is this? Not mine!" His own version: media that uses retailer data, or that lives on a retailer's owned property. He conceded that some on-site ad types do need more work on incrementality. But Clarkson also argues that retailer data lets you find shoppers who have browsed your category, bought into relevant adjacencies, and spend at the right level. Clarkson answered Ritson's argument with a single word. "Codswallop!"
Brian Spencer, marketing director at Kroger Precision Marketing, patiently explained that brands use retail media audiences across CTV, audio and social, not just onsite on a retailer's website.
Targeting capabilities allow brands to reach lapsed buyers, competitive buyers, and households that have never bought the brand at all — and that you can build an audience which deliberately excludes your recent and loyal buyers.
Exclude your own customers, spend the whole budget on people who have never picked you up. Brand marketers have wanted that for decades. It exists now, and it's a rounding error in most retail media budgets.
Most marketers don't understand all the things that retail media actually includes. Because Ritson's description fits sponsored products ads almost perfectly.
But it doesn't fit a retail media audience activated in streaming TV against households that have never bought you. Lipsman's framing — retail media is "both a channel and a layer" — is the crux of the disagreement.
Where the skeptics have a point
Lipsman lands one correction that isn't a matter of opinion. Ritson called attributing sales to shoppers already in your store "the single most flattering metric in marketing." Lipsman's response: that would be fair if in-store advertising were measured that way, but no serious brand accepts ROAS or attributed sales for in-store, and matched market testing is the standard.
Ritson has his own point that survives most of the criticism. In 2024 the ANA asked marketers where retail media money comes from, and only 10% said it was incremental. The rest is coming out of something, and a good chunk of it is coming out of brand budgets. No amount of evidence about what retail media can do answers a question about where the money went.
Which brings in some fresh Kantar numbers.
Across 1,589 campaigns in their LIFT database, Kantar finds that retail media beats the average channel on unaided awareness (0.9 versus 0.6), online ad awareness (7.6 versus 6.5), brand favorability (3.9 versus 3.6) and purchase intent (3.8 versus 3.4).
But candidly it still loses on a couple. Aided awareness comes in at 2.5 against an average of 3.2. Message association — roughly, did people connect what they saw back to your brand — comes in at 4.0 against 4.4.
There's a second thing worth saying about that data. A brand lift study only exists because a brand was willing to pay for one, which means the LIFT database is full of campaigns with real budget and real creative behind them. That might not be the median retail media buy, and Ritson's whole point is about the median retail media buy.
So perhaps everyone is right
Lipsman settled this himself, in a LinkedIn reply. He conceded that search and branded search take 70-80% of retail media dollars and agreed that it's bad practice, the same ROAS-chasing that goes on at Meta and Google. His point was that "just because brands don't invest enough into the right formats doesn't mean the capacity for brand-building doesn't exist."
The measurement experts suggested, with little pushback, that advertisers shouldn't rely on retailer-provided bottom-of-funnel metrics like ROAS. Instead they should run holdout studies, work out what's actually incremental, and move their budgets accordingly.
Both of these pot-stirrers are right, but they're describing different things. Ritson is describing where the money goes. His critics are describing what the channel is capable of.
