Why Your ROAS Is Lying to You: Last-Touch Attribution, Retail Media's Dirty Secret

Skye Frontier of Incremental came on ADOTAT to tell me everything the marketing industry doesn't want you to know. He did not disappoint.We got into why ROAS is the high fructose corn syrup of marketing measurement, how 73% of organizations are still running their entire media programs on a metric that has no proven connection to actual sales, and why the platforms selling you attribution software have absolutely no incentive to fix any of this.Skye has spent his career in measurement and incrementality, which means he has spent his career watching smart people cling to broken metrics for completely rational organizational reasons. He explains exactly why that happens, what it costs, and what actually works instead.We also got into retail media, the $59 billion industry that is quietly charging brands to appear on shelves they already stocked, why closed-loop attribution claims from retail media networks deserve the same skepticism as everything else, and who is actually winning the retail media wars and who is pretending to.Then we talked about AI, agentic marketing, and why throwing artificial intelligence at a last-touch attribution problem does not solve the problem. It just automates the mistake at greater speed and scale.Plus: the color vomit presentation story. The desert island incrementality pitch. Whether Skye would trade his ad server for a fishing pole. And the one belief he holds about this industry that would get him escorted out of a corporate retreat.This is one of the most honest conversations about how marketing measurement actually works that we have put on tape. Watch it. last touch attribution, ROAS, return on ad spend, incrementality, incrementality testing, causal inference, marketing measurement, attribution modeling, multi touch attribution, retail media, retail media networks, Amazon advertising, Walmart Connect, Amazon Marketing Cloud, AMC, retail media attribution, closed loop attribution, programmatic advertising, digital advertising, ad tech, adtech, media buying, marketing analytics, marketing mix modeling, MMM, media measurement, brand measurement, brand equity, AI in marketing, agentic AI, marketing AI, automated media buying, algorithmic bidding, smart bidding, reward hacking, programmatic optimization, CTV measurement, connected TV advertising, digital media, performance marketing, marketing effectiveness, media planning, media strategy, marketing budget optimization, ad spend optimization, Google Ads attribution, Meta attribution, Facebook ads measurement, Amazon ads, sponsored products, retail media spend, first party data, clean rooms, data clean rooms, walled gardens, ad fraud, marketing ROI, incremental ROAS, iROAS, holdout testing, geo experiments, conversion lift, brand lift, marketing KPIs, CMO, marketing leadership, B2B marketing, ad tech podcast, m 🎵 Copyrighted music licensed from Lickd. https://lickd.co My Type by Saint Motel, https://t.lickd.co/l/QqwoDJ3gmvL