Trevor Testwuide, CEO and co-founder, Measured
The modern consumer today discovers a brand on TikTok, asks an AI assistant for a second opinion, compares prices on a marketplace and finally buys through a retail media network while filling their grocery cart. Every platform in that chain will claim full credit for the sale — most of them will be wrong, and misallocating budget based on that fiction is leaving real revenue on the table.
A structural incentive problem baked into how platforms report performance has quietly become one of the most expensive habits in retail. What looks like marketing ROI on a spreadsheet is often something closer to a loyalty tax: money spent recapturing customers who were already going to buy.
The framework hasn’t kept up
Traditional last-touch and platform-reported models were built for a simpler era. They made sense when the path to purchase was short and the number of channels was manageable. Neither of those things is true anymore, and what remains is a measurement framework that systematically rewards proximity to the checkout over actual influence on the decision, training teams to celebrate the metric rather than interrogate it.
