Measurement credibility is under sustained attack from multiple directions this week. Forrester's retail media incrementality report crystallized a growing industry frustration: retail media networks have largely gotten away with attribution methodologies that conflate correlation with causation, and the market is now demanding incrementality-based proof of performance as the standard. This is a significant commercial threat to retail media networks that have built their value propositions on last-touch or closed-loop attribution within their own walled gardens.
Simultaneously, Padsquad made the provocative case that digital advertising measurement is fundamentally broken and that offline signals represent the most credible fix — an argument that dovetails with the broader industry anxiety about signal loss in digital environments. The AdExchanger data broker compliance piece added a regulatory dimension, highlighting that companies which have not self-identified as data brokers are increasingly finding that regulators disagree — a compliance risk that touches data clean rooms, identity resolution vendors, and analytics platforms alike.