By Katherine Meyer, Product Marketing Manager at Chicory

The Measurement Gap

Brands and agencies today are bombarded by conflicting advertising metrics: CTRs, ROAS, ATCs, and sales lift. They look at the numbers on their dashboards that seem promising on the surface. But the lingering question remains: did the campaign actually work?

Last week, Chicory’s co-founder and CEO, Yuni Baker-Saito, joined leaders from Bayer, RoC Skincare, and Mars United Commerce at Digiday’s "Retail Media Advertising Strategies" event to answer just that.

Marketers are often left to wonder whether a sale would have just happened anyway. That’s why the industry, specifically within retail media, is increasingly coming around to one metric when it comes to defining success: incrementality.

Why Incrementality Matters

Incrementality extracts the true impact of a campaign, moving beyond correlation to reveal causation. It shows whether media exposure truly drove real outcomes, not just what happened during the campaign period. And in doing so, provides:

Clarity: defining sales that would have happened vs. actual campaign-driven lift.
Confidence: proving that spend directly contributed to growth.
Direction: informing smarter optimizations for future campaign success.

Free Guide

Contextual Commerce Media Delivers Measurable Results

Brands need partners who understand their goals beyond surface-level metrics. In this guide, we provide insight into Chicory’s measurement capabilities, and how our approach empowers brands to get the most out of their spend.

Chicory’s Measurement Strategy

“Measurement is becoming more and more important. [For] CPGs, fundamentally, retail media opened up this ability to measure — it wasn’t just brand awareness, it wasn’t just volume of impressions,” says Yuni.

Chicory is setting a new bar for commerce media effectiveness at a time when brands are demanding more measurable outcomes from retail partners. We’ve built a measurement strategy around incrementality, because it’s what ultimately matters for brands and agencies.

At Chicory, we pride ourselves on making incrementality our sweet spot. Our contextual commerce media starts by reaching consumers in the right moments while they are in an active mindset, and we measure success by proving true impact, whether that’s driving incremental sales or reaching new and lapsed shoppers.

That means campaigns are evaluated not just on impressions or clicks, but on their ability to drive incremental sales and real outcomes.

Incremental Impact in Action

A leading protein manufacturer partnered with Chicory during the Easter and spring hosting season and drove strong incrementality:

9.8X iROAS
$736K incremental sales
4.5% featured item sales lift

Looking Forward

Retail media continues to expand, evolve, and drive movement in the industry, but the foundation of success will remain the same: incrementality defines impact. As RMNs continue to mature and brands demand more measurable outcomes, incrementality will be the proof point that matters most. By leaning into incrementality, advertisers can invest with clarity, confidence, and direction, to be sure they are driving true growth.