Your Advertiser Has a Question. You Have a Study.

By Chris Wilson, CEO, Tenetic

For a decade I ran the commercial side of Scarborough, and before Tenetic I was president of Simmons. Which means that when two numbers about the same audience disagreed, I was often the person the argument got escalated to.

Those meetings had a shape. Somebody had a study that said one thing. Somebody else had a report that said another. Both were methodologically defensible, and that was the problem, because a defensible disagreement is much harder to end than a mistake. I could explain, correctly, why both numbers were right.  But in the time taken debating the data, the decision window keeps getting smaller.

We all have some version of that meeting. But now, that tension has only become more relevant as the way advertisers use data continues to change.

Retail media changed what advertisers expect

EMARKETER puts US omnichannel retail media spend at $69.33 billion in 2026, up 17.9 percent in a year. Most of the commentary treats that number as a story about closed-loop proof. It’s also a story about changing expectations

Retail media trained a generation of advertisers to arrive with a specific question about a specific audience and to expect a specific answer back. Not a rating. Not a demographic shell. An answer to the thing they asked, at the level they asked it.

That habit does not stay inside the channel that created it. It travels into every other conversation the advertiser has. That doesn’t mean every channel can or should operate like retail media. It does mean the standard against which advertisers evaluate their media partners is changing.

It did not deliver certainty, and that part is instructive

Skai and Stratably published their State of Retail Media report in January, drawn from 166 brand and agency organizations. Seven in ten met or exceeded their retail media goals in 2025. Ask the same group how effective they are at measuring performance and only 15 percent call themselves very or extremely effective.

Those two findings are not a contradiction. Both can be true at once. What you are looking at is a channel where advertisers are getting results and still struggle to  fully account for what drove them.

Then look at why. Methodology complexity comes in at 6 percent. The barrier brands actually name, at 56 percent, is a shortage of internal analytics and data science resources. Incrementality tops the list of measurement challenges at 75 percent, with cross-channel measurement behind it at 59 percent.

So the constraint is not the data. Retail media has more of it than any channel in history. The constraint is translating that data into useful understanding, which remains difficult even in a channel built around measurement and accountability.

Which is the same problem you have, in a harder form

Here is where I would ask a broadcaster or a publisher to be honest with themselves.

Your advertiser now asks a question shaped by retail media. Something narrow, current, and specific to their category. What can you hand back?

In most cases you hand back a study. Local audience depth and national breadth arrive as two separate subscriptions, from two different vendors, on two different refresh cycles, and both refresh roughly twice a year. The panels underneath them are thinning. Pew Research documented telephone survey response rates falling from 36 percent in 1997 to 6 percent by 2018, and they have not recovered. Every audience claim the sell side makes inherits that decay.

I helped build that model, and it was a good answer to the market it was designed to serve. But the market around it has changed.

Advertisers are making decisions across channels faster and with more information at their disposal than ever before. This puts growing pressure on the entire ecosystem to consider whether the way audience intelligence is delivered has evolved alongside the way it is now being used.

 The unit changed and almost nobody repriced for it

The industry continues to debate whose measurement is better. These arguments matter, but it is not the one costing sellers money this quarter.

What changed is the unit of work. It used to be the study, purchased annually, consumed by a research department, and pulled off the shelf when somebody needed a number. It is now the question, asked by an advertiser on their own timeline, expected back inside their decision window.

A seller who can answer the question competes. A seller who can only produce the study is asking the advertiser to be patient, and retail media spent the last five years teaching them not to be.

There is a version of this that reads as bad news for local media, and I do not think it is. The advertiser asking a sharper question is an advertiser who has decided your audience is worth understanding properly. That is a better position than being bought on habit. It only becomes bad news if the answer takes three weeks.

Your advertiser has a question. If the only thing you can hand them is a study, you are not losing on data. You are losing on the calendar.

Author Bio:

Chris Wilson is the CEO of Tenetic, an always-on audience intelligence platform covering 209 US markets. He previously ran the commercial side of Scarborough and served as president of Simmons.