Martinelli's, the premium juice brand, has moved away from standard return-on-ad-spend measurement in its retail media campaigns, adopting incremen...
The Signal
Martinelli's, the premium juice brand, has moved away from standard return-on-ad-spend measurement in its retail media campaigns, adopting incremental ROAS as its primary performance metric. The shift represents a direct challenge to how most brands currently evaluate retail media efficiency — trading a simpler, often flattering headline number for a harder look at whether retail media spend is actually driving new purchases rather than capturing sales that would have occurred anyway. The brand is actively testing the incremental ROAS framework across its retail media investments, using it to isolate genuine lift from baseline demand. The methodology forces a more rigorous accounting of what retail media is truly delivering — separating influenced conversions from those attributable to organic purchase intent, brand loyalty, or other non-media factors. For a category like premium juice, where repeat purchase rates and strong brand recognition can inflate conventional ROAS figures, the distinction carries real budget consequences. Martinelli's move signals growing sophistication among brand-side marketers who are no longer willing to accept retail media's self-reported attribution as sufficient justification for continued or expanded spend.
Why It Matters
Martinelli's isn't just adopting a better metric — they're calling retail media's bluff, and the networks know it. Incremental ROAS is uncomfortable precisely because it works: it systematically exposes the portion of retail media spend that's essentially a toll booth, extracting payment for purchases that were already going to happen. For a brand with Martinelli's purchase dynamics — high repeat rates, strong seasonal pull, loyal household penetration — conventional ROAS was almost certainly flattering them into overspending. What surface coverage misses is the political weight of this move. Retail media networks have thrived on the opacity of last-touch attribution, and brand-side acceptance of headline ROAS has been the load-bearing assumption underneath billions in retail media investment. When a brand publicly commits to incrementality testing, they're not just refining their measurement — they're creating internal justification to reallocate or cut spend that can't prove lift. That's a direct threat to retailer margin, and it will not go unnoticed in their next joint business planning conversation. The broader pattern here is a measurement maturation cycle that mirrors what happened in programmatic display a decade ago. Brands eventually stopped accepting viewability as a proxy for value. Retail media is entering that same reckoning, compressed by tighter budgets and CFOs who've started asking pointed questions about the category's ROI claims. Martinelli's is early, but they won't be alone by Q4. For senior marketers still running retail media on standard ROAS, the strategic risk isn't just overspending — it's losing the internal credibility to defend the channel when scrutiny arrives. And it's arriving.
The Exploit
Opportunity
Brand-side marketing leaders at CPG companies with high repeat-purchase categories—think beverage, snacks, personal care—have a 6-month window to reframe their retail media posture before Q1 2027 JBP negotiations. Those who arrive at those conversations with incrementality data own the leverage: they can surgically cut non-incremental placements, redeploy 20-40% of retail media budget to demonstrably productive inventory, and negotiate from evidence rather than exposure.
Risk
Teams still reporting standard ROAS to CFOs and board stakeholders are one budget cycle away from a credibility crisis. When retail media scrutiny arrives—and Martinelli's public commitment accelerates that timeline—leaders without incrementality infrastructure won't just face overspend exposure; they'll lose the internal authority to defend the channel at all, ceding the reallocation decision to finance rather than marketing.
The Move
Before August 2026, commission an incrementality audit on your single largest retail media network relationship—not a full program review, just the top-spend retailer. Use holdout testing or a third-party measurement partner to establish a baseline incremental ROAS figure. That number becomes your JBP anchor: if it clears your threshold, you scale with confidence; if it doesn't, you have the data to cut before the retailer frames the conversation first. CMO owns this mandate; measurement or analytics lead executes.
First-Mover Advantage
Gains
Risks
Teams still reporting standard ROAS to CFOs and board stakeholders are one budget cycle away from a credibility crisis. When retail media scrutiny arrives—and Martinelli's public commitment accelerates that timeline—leaders without incrementality infrastructure won't just face overspend exposure; they'll lose the internal authority to defend the channel at all, ceding the reallocation decision to finance rather than marketing.
Window
Winners & Losers
Winners↑
Incrementality Testing and Measurement Vendors
Martinelli's public commitment to incremental ROAS creates a category-level signal that sophisticated measurement is now a competitive necessity, not an optional upgrade — directly expanding the addressable market for vendors offering lift testing, holdout methodology, and causal inference tools. The mechanism is peer pressure and internal political cover: brand-side marketers at comparable companies now have a named precedent to justify budget and organisational investment in incrementality infrastructure. These vendors should be actively building Martinelli's into sales collateral and accelerating case study development ahead of Q3 and Q4 joint business planning cycles when budget conversations intensify.
Performance Marketing Consultancies Specialising in Retail Media Audits
As brands begin questioning whether their retail media spend is generating genuine lift or simply taxing organic demand, the appetite for third-party audits and measurement restructuring engagements will grow sharply — particularly among mid-to-large CPG brands with high repeat purchase rates where conventional ROAS inflation is most pronounced. The mechanism mirrors what happened in programmatic display when viewability scrutiny created a wave of media audit mandates: external validation becomes politically necessary when internal teams need to justify reallocation decisions to CFOs. Consultancies should be packaging incrementality audit offerings now and targeting category managers in high-loyalty CPG verticals where the Martinelli's dynamic most closely applies.
Brand-Side Media Strategy and Analytics Teams
Internal teams that adopt incremental ROAS frameworks gain a defensible, CFO-legible methodology for protecting or reallocating retail media budgets — shifting the internal power dynamic away from retailer-controlled attribution narratives and toward marketer-controlled accountability standards. The mechanism is credibility: when budget scrutiny arrives, teams running incrementality testing have a rigorous answer while those relying on headline ROAS are exposed to challenge. These teams should move quickly to establish holdout testing protocols before Q4 planning windows open in Q3 2026, positioning themselves as measurement leaders rather than reactive followers.
Losers↓
Retail Media Networks Dependent on Last-Touch Attribution Revenue
Incremental ROAS directly threatens the self-reported attribution frameworks that have allowed retail media networks to justify spend on purchases that would have occurred regardless of ad exposure — and Martinelli's public adoption creates a replicable model that other brands will cite in joint business planning negotiations as early as Q3 2026. The mechanism is structural: once incrementality testing becomes a brand-side norm, the portion of retail media spend classified as 'toll booth' revenue becomes indefensible, compressing both the volume and pricing power of non-incremental inventory. Networks will likely respond by developing their own incrementality measurement offerings to retain narrative control, but brand-side scepticism of self-graded homework will limit how much credibility those solutions earn.
Last-Touch and Conventional ROAS Attribution Technology Vendors
The measurement maturation cycle Martinelli's is accelerating poses an existential positioning threat to vendors whose core value proposition rests on conventional ROAS reporting — the same dynamic that eroded viewability-only metrics in programmatic display is now compressing the retail media attribution layer. The mechanism is substitution: as incremental ROAS becomes the credible standard, last-touch tools increasingly look like vanity dashboards that flatter spend rather than justify it, weakening renewal conversations and competitive positioning against incrementality-native platforms. Defensive responses will likely include bolt-on incrementality features and rebranding efforts, but vendors without genuine lift measurement methodology will struggle to close the credibility gap against purpose-built alternatives.
Strategic Outlook
Retail media measurement has been heading toward this reckoning since roughly 2023, when a wave of CFO-level scrutiny started hitting marketing budgets across CPG. What accelerated the timeline was the simultaneous tightening of trade promotion budgets and the blurring of retail media with traditional co-op spend — once finance teams started treating them as the same line item, the tolerance for self-reported attribution collapsed quickly. Martinelli's move lands in that specific pressure window. The historical parallel that matters most here is programmatic display circa 2015 to 2017, when brands progressively stopped accepting click-through rate and viewability as value proxies and forced the industry toward attention metrics and outcome-based buying. That transition took nearly four years and required sustained budget pressure plus a handful of high-profile brand pullbacks to normalize. Retail media is moving faster because the institutional memory exists — measurement teams at major CPG companies already lived through that cycle and recognize the pattern. What this signals about direction is less about incrementality as a concept, which sophisticated buyers have discussed for years, and more about brand-side willingness to weaponize it in joint business planning. When measurement becomes a negotiating tool, network pricing models follow. That conversation is starting now, and it will define how retail media scales — or doesn't — through 2027.