Let’s stop pretending.
Retail media was supposed to be the next great hope for digital advertising. A cookie-less future powered by first-party data, real-world purchases, and something everyone could finally agree on: measurable outcomes.

But that dream is curdling. Fast.

Instead of a transparent ecosystem built on trust and outcomes, we got a glorified toll booth, where brands pay to exist, and then pay again for the privilege of being told it worked.

The sell is seductive:
Retail Media Networks (RMNs) offer a “closed loop”—the ability to match ad exposures to actual purchases, both online and in-store. On paper, it's a marketer's dream. But scratch the surface and it feels a lot more like a hostage situation. And the ransom? Your entire media budget.

That’s not paranoia. That’s the game.
Retailers control the media. They control the sales data. They control the store. And more often than not, they’re the only ones grading the results. The same people who sell you the ad are the ones telling you how effective it was. That should terrify everyone.

Walmart Connect, Amazon Ads, Kroger Precision Marketing, Instacart—they’ve become gatekeepers. Want access to customers? Buy an ad. Want decent placement? Buy more. Want attribution? Use their tools. And when those tools show 7x ROAS, don’t ask for the math.

“There’s no way to independently verify anything,” said a performance marketing lead at a Fortune 500 brand. “We just have to take the platform’s word for it. And we do—because we can’t afford to get frozen out.”

The phrase “retail media tax” comes up often. But that’s not strong enough. It’s not a tax if you have no choice. It’s extortion disguised as strategy.

Let’s say you want to know where your money went. You want to understand the actual uplift. The incremental value. Not modeled. Not estimated. Real data.

Good luck.

Third-party audits? Rare. Transparent measurement standards? Inconsistent. Independent attribution? Non-existent. Most RMNs are running on proprietary black-box metrics, with their own dashboards, their own rules, and no obligation to reconcile with anything else. If you’re lucky, they’ll give you a report. If you’re bold, they might give you access to raw data—aggregated and anonymized, of course.

But if you push? If you ask too many questions?

“I’ve seen what happens when brands try to negotiate harder,” said a retail investment consultant. “They start getting less promotional support. Suddenly, you’re not in the email blast. Suddenly, your seasonal campaign isn’t prioritized.”

Everyone in this space knows someone who’s gotten burned. Maybe not publicly, but behind closed doors. A brand that held firm on a joint business plan. A media lead who asked for attribution transparency. A CMO who suggested taking a portion of the budget elsewhere.

And then…
“the support just wasn’t there anymore.”

Shelf space is currency. So is promotional priority. In a world where the line between media investment and commercial relationship is blurred beyond recognition, there’s a quiet but persistent fear that rocking the boat could sink the whole partnership.

It’s not subtle. It’s structural.

Marketers aren’t dumb. They talk. In Slack channels, industry DMs, whispered sidebars at ANA and IAB events—everyone’s comparing notes.

And the mood? Tense. Resigned. Furious. But mostly stuck.

“We know we’re being forced to spend more every year,” said one digital media VP. “But no one wants to be the one who walks away. Because what if you’re wrong? What if your competitor takes that slot and actually gets the boost?”

Retail media could have been the clean break digital needed.
Instead, it’s becoming the new pay-to-play dystopia, where performance is manufactured, accountability is optional, and fear is the business model.

This column is the start of a deeper series. What comes next is going to make some folks uncomfortable. Good.

Because someone needs to say it:

💥 And that’s just the tip of the barcode.

How Retail Media Networks Distort Reality Through Closed-Loop Manipulation

The retail media ecosystem is quietly undergoing a reckoning. While advertisers pour billions into Retail Media Networks (RMNs) under the promise of precise, closed-loop measurement, insiders and industry analysts are increasingly questioning the validity of the results being reported. What was once marketed as the gold standard of performance marketing is now under fire for being a statistical sleight-of-hand that overstates effectiveness, masks underperformance, and locks brands into opaque systems with little recourse.

At the center of this tension is a measurement model designed to benefit the seller. RMNs simultaneously operate as media providers, sales platforms, and performance evaluators—creating inherent conflicts of interest. The outcome is a marketplace where return on ad spend (ROAS) is inflated, incrementality is ignored, and advertisers are left with a distorted view of what’s actually driving growth.

The primary concern raised by brand marketers and independent analysts is the structural bias in attribution logic used by RMNs. In most cases, RMNs default to last-click attribution, a simplistic model that disproportionately credits the final touchpoint prior to purchase. This model fails to reflect the increasingly complex and multi-channel consumer journey.

For instance, a consumer may discover a product on Instagram, research it on Google, and later purchase it on Walmart.com after seeing a retargeted ad. In such cases, Walmart’s RMN is likely to claim full credit, even if its ad played a minimal role in the purchasing decision.

Made-for-Advertising (MFA) sites—low-quality websites designed to maximize ad impressions—further complicate attribution. Some RMNs strategically place ads on MFA sites to capture low-cost clicks. If a user later purchases the product within the attribution window, the RMN claims the sale, regardless of whether the click had any material impact.

The attribution window itself is a lever often used to inflate performance. For categories with habitual buying cycles—such as personal care or packaged goods—a 7-day or 14-day click-through window all but guarantees the retailer will receive credit for purchases that would have occurred organically.

“We know we’re being charged for conversions that had little to do with our ads,” said one CPG performance marketing executive. “But without log-level transparency, it’s difficult to prove.”

Advertisers increasingly cite concerns around blended ROAS metrics, which combine both organic and ad-driven revenue. This blended approach allows RMNs to report strong campaign performance, even when the incremental impact is negligible.

Few RMNs provide support for incrementality testing—a method that isolates true lift from a campaign through holdout groups or regional experimentation. Without it, advertisers are left with performance reports that cannot distinguish correlation from causation.

In a study conducted by a large brand conglomerate, internal geo-based tests revealed that up to 40% of sales attributed to RMN campaigns would have occurred without any media exposure. The company now only trusts results when incrementality has been independently validated.

Further complicating matters, RMNs often retroactively align revenue with ad impressions, assigning purchases to earlier click events to artificially boost campaign performance. This tactic obscures the actual time of sale and makes ROI analysis unreliable.

Closed-loop measurement—long promoted as a hallmark of retail media’s superiority—has devolved into a marketing slogan with diminishing substance. While RMNs do have access to point-of-sale data, they also control what data advertisers are allowed to see. In practice, this means:

“We don’t know how the numbers are being calculated,” noted a senior analytics lead at Revlon. “There’s no baseline or agreed-upon methodology. We’re trusting platforms that profit from our spend to also tell us it worked.”

The incentive structure of RMNs creates a dangerous dynamic. Because retailers earn revenue directly from media investments, they have every reason to report favorable outcomes and little reason to invest in independent validation.

Three core issues underpin this environment:

While the power imbalance is real, leading brands are taking steps to regain control. Recommended actions include:

Retail media’s promise was measurement with precision. What’s emerged is a hall of mirrors—where every campaign looks successful, every click is celebrated, and the truth is buried beneath proprietary metrics and self-policing attribution logic.

Until RMNs embrace independent validation and advertisers demand greater transparency, the illusion will persist—and brands will continue paying a premium for what may amount to little more than digital shelf rent.

The relationship between brands and Retail Media Networks (RMNs) increasingly resembles a coercive arrangement: transactional in appearance, but extractive in practice. With control over consumer data, search visibility, and point-of-sale infrastructure, RMNs have positioned themselves not as partners—but as landlords. Their tenants? Consumer brands, many of which now find themselves locked into an ecosystem where continued spend is not optional—it’s existential.

This system thrives on psychological pressure, informational asymmetry, and platform-controlled performance narratives. The result is a business model that extracts value rather than builds it, where measurement opacity and market leverage enable recurring revenue from brands without corresponding increases in incremental sales.

Retailers exploit four core vulnerabilities in the brand psyche:

On platforms like Amazon, where 64% of product searches begin, the threat of losing top-of-page or “buy box” placement is not theoretical—it’s commercial death. Brands understand that even modest drops in ranking lead to measurable declines in sales, especially in highly competitive categories. RMNs frame ad spending as essential visibility insurance, not optional marketing.

As third-party cookies disappear, brands find themselves locked out of understanding their own customers—unless they pay for access. RMNs own the first-party transaction data, and they monetize it by forcing advertisers to rent it back through campaign spend. In effect, brands are paying for insights generated by their own customer relationships.

RMN dashboards offer abundant performance metrics—ROAS, CTR, impressions—but few provide transparency on how those metrics are calculated, where ads were served, or who saw them. Brands are left optimizing to numbers they cannot independently verify, often unaware that the underlying algorithms are engineered to maximize platform revenue, not campaign efficiency.

From limited-time placements to exclusive seasonal ad packages, RMNs rely on scarcity-driven tactics to push spend commitments. Coupled with quarterly performance reviews and year-over-year expectations built into joint business planning (JBP) cycles, these levers condition brands to operate reactively, not strategically.

The RMN playbook follows a familiar rhythm:

Over time, these cycles normalize increasing spend levels—even as returns stagnate.

The financial implications for brands are substantial:

Some advertisers are pushing back—quietly at first, then structurally. The following strategies are gaining momentum:

As the RMN market scales—projected to exceed $100 billion globally by 2028—transparency concerns threaten to become a ceiling on its growth. The current growth trajectory relies heavily on brand trust. But that trust is eroding.

RMNs have become too critical to remain unregulated. If retail media is to mature into a sustainable marketing channel, advertisers and regulators must begin to treat RMNs as digital infrastructure—essential but accountable.

This means:

Until that happens, retail media will continue to operate as a system optimized not for efficiency or innovation—but for extraction.

Structural Reforms to End the Retail Media Accountability Crisis

Retail media has reached an inflection point. What began as a high-potential channel powered by first-party data has evolved into a fragmented, opaque, and increasingly extractive ecosystem. While ad budgets continue to shift toward Retail Media Networks (RMNs), the current model is unsustainable. Advertisers are operating in a closed environment where the seller controls the inventory, the targeting, and the scorecard.

Glossy whitepapers and voluntary “best practices” won’t fix what’s fundamentally a problem of misaligned incentives and unchecked market power. Real change requires structural reform—and the willingness of stakeholders to challenge the current status quo.

Below are six necessary—if difficult—steps to bring accountability, transparency, and true performance measurement to retail media.

The Problem: RMNs are currently both the sellers and the judges of their own performance. This dual role presents a glaring conflict of interest.

The Fix:

Why It Matters:
Third-party validation is the cornerstone of every mature media channel. Until this is the norm in retail media, brands are being asked to trust unverifiable data from entities that profit directly from inflated results.

The Problem: RMNs routinely link media investments to promotional access, turning advertising into a pay-to-play mechanism for retail visibility.

The Fix:

Why It Matters:
Media dollars should be spent based on return, not leverage. Tying media to merchandising distorts incentives and undermines the integrity of performance marketing.

The Problem: RMNs rely on closed-loop attribution models that often exaggerate the impact of their own ads, crediting any sale within a fixed window as a win—regardless of intent or influence.

The Fix:

Why It Matters:
Marketers need clarity on what’s working. Inflated metrics based on proximity to purchase incentivize inefficient spending and penalize broader-funnel efforts.

The Problem: No governing body currently holds RMNs accountable for measurement practices, attribution integrity, or fair play.

The Fix:

Why It Matters:
An organized governance structure can bring pressure, consistency, and credibility to a space that is currently fragmented and self-policed.

The Problem: Brands are afraid to challenge RMNs for fear of retaliation—particularly around shelf placement and promotion visibility.

The Fix:

Why It Matters:
Without leverage, brands remain dependent and voiceless. A coordinated approach makes it harder for any single brand to be penalized, and signals to the market that opaque practices come with a cost.

The Problem: Retailers often limit access to granular audience and transaction data, citing privacy concerns—while continuing to monetize that data for their own media sales.

The Fix:

Why It Matters:
Clean rooms offer a path to transparency that respects privacy and security mandates. They allow advertisers to test hypotheses, validate spend, and collaborate more effectively.

None of these reforms will happen through inertia. They demand bold leadership from across the ecosystem:

The era of “just trust us” is over. In its place must come real verification, real separation of powers, and a level of transparency appropriate for a $100 billion channel.

Retail media has the potential to become the most powerful performance marketing channel of the next decade. But not like this. Not with black boxes, conflicted incentives, and manufactured scarcity.

Cleaning up the space requires action—painful, systemic, and enforced.

If no one’s willing to demand better, retail media won’t evolve.
It’ll just consolidate further, extract more, and quietly become one of the most expensive illusions in marketing history.