Your retail media ROAS is 8:1.

Your retail media ROAS is 8:1. But your actual incrementality is 1.2:1. That's the silent killer of 2026. A Head of Retail Media at a $150M brand confessed last week: *"Our board loves the ROAS numbers. They don't know we're cannibalizing our own sales."* She's not alone. I see this every day. Retail media networks are selling the same customers you already have. When I took over omnichannel strategy for a $300M retailer, we found that 47% of retail media "sales" were customers who would have bought anyway. We were paying premium prices for nothing. **The Retail Media Incrementality Framework:** 1. Test against holdout groups. If you're not measuring lift, you're guessing.n2. Track new-to-file customers separately. That's your true retail media contribution.n3. Measure profit, not revenue. High ROAS with zero profit is vanity.n4. Coordinate with your DTC strategy. Don't compete with yourself.n5. Build predictive models. We forecast cannibalization before spending a dollar. The brands that win in retail media aren't the ones spending the most. They're the ones spending intelligently. I've cut CPA by 66%, lifted ROAS by 67%, and scaled DTC revenue 20% WoW for 12 weeks. But retail media taught me the hardest lesson: vanity metrics kill profitability. What's your real retail media incrementality? Have you ever measured it?