• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, July 3, 2024

It was bound to happen, but this week I finally got my first pitch for a story about "multi-retailer attribution" (MRA) model. Think multi-touch attribution, but for retail media ROI.

The timing shouldn't be surprising given the rapid rise of retail media networks, as well as the fragmentation of touchpoints consumers are exposed to before they make a final decision to actually buy a retail product after being exposed to ads along the way.

Interestingly, unlike multi-touch attribution models that reply all or primarily on digital touchpoints, the new MRA model developed by Amazon and Stackline also factors brick-and-mortar impressions into the mix.

"This new offering redefines how brands measure the sales impact of their advertising across multiple retailers – online and brick-and-mortar – addressing long-standing challenges in the industry," Stackline CEO Michael Langoni writes in a blog post showing the results of an attribution analysis for an undisclosed beverage brand that advertised on Amazon, but ultimately generated half its sales conversions at two other ecommerce retailers: Walmart and Target (see above).

In another anonymized analysis, Lagoni cites a $10 million buy media by a "prominent multinational grocery" brand on "Thursday Night Football," which "contributed an additional $63 million in sales from other retail partners."

Alas, like most other media vendor-oriented attribution models, the new MRA is based on proprietary technology developed by Stackline and data from Amazon Marketing Cloud, making it difficult to peek under any hoods, so take the results of this year's model with a grain of salt.