GroupM, WPP’s media shop, has teamed up with measurement company Incremental (formerly Tradeswell) in an attempt to zero in on the impact of retail media buys. The agency announced the new partnership at the Cannes Lions Festival.
The deal, announced today, will give GroupM clients access to AI-driven planning tools, forecasting, measurement and analytics for retail media. Because it’s plugged into GroupM’s Open Media Studio, client teams can manage retail media alongside all other digital media.
“We want to be able to plan our retail media investment dollars in the same place, with the same rigor, as we’re planning the rest of our digital dollars,” Sam Bukowski, global head of commerce at GroupM, told ADWEEK. “[It’s] a co-engineered approach to bringing Incremental intelligence into our platform and our tools that are thinking about an integrated end-to-end approach.”
The deal is the second retail media-related partnership announcement from GroupM in a week. On June 12, the agency unveiled that it’s working with Shalion, a retail intelligence company specializing in digital shelf analytics.
What is incrementality?
This move comes at a moment when incrementality has become the ad industry’s buzzword du jour, in part as a response to the industry’s over-reliance—and subsequent souring—on return on ad spend (ROAS).
While ROAS measures how many sales (or other success metrics) are achieved during an ad campaign, incrementality-based metrics aim to narrow that measure to include only the sales that wouldn’t have happened without the campaign.
ROAS can be easily manipulated, noted retail media analyst Andrew Lipsman, and often isn’t a good way to measure success in a retail media environment.
Paying for sponsored product ads in the search results of your brand name will look great from a ROAS perspective, but most of those people searching specifically for your brand were probably going to buy it anyway.
Incremental measurement aims to cut out the sales that were already in motion. For example, people who were already planning to buy a gallon of milk and would’ve done so whether or not they saw an ad for milk on the way into the grocery store, explained Incremental CEO David Pollet. The goal is to swap correlation for causation.
The age-old question: Did it work?
It’s really just another attempt to answer the age-old question of advertising measurement: Did it work? And it’s hard to get a precise picture.
“You need some system for—wherever possible—doing holdouts and control groups,” Pollet said. “Incrementality is a very specific definition. It requires that there are places where you have made the ad disappear, perceived the performance of it, and then made the ad reappear and looked at that performance.”
By integrating with GroupM, Incremental can incorporate additional data assets into its modeling—building a more accurate prediction of which retail media generates incremental sales for brands. Still, it’s a challenge in retail media environments, and measurement must include all channels to give a valuable estimate of incremental sales.