Melissa Gallo — Vice President, Solutions and Delivery, Vantage
Published:
Media dollars should be held to media standards, including incrementality and return. Where a retailer’s offering is sufficiently sophisticated, it should also compete against other paid channels for investment. Where it is not, it should not receive the label—or the budget protection—of media merely because it is sold by a retail media network.
What does Melissa Gallo say?
Melissa Gallo, Vice President, Solutions and Delivery, Vantage, says: Melissa Gallo, Vice President, Solutions and Delivery at Vantage, argues that marketers should classify individual dollars rather than channels when evaluating retail media, separating trade-like spend from media spend and holding each to appropriate standards. She warns that cuts typically fall to test-and-learn budgets (undermining future learning), recommends operational checks for network quality, sees in-store as a 2027 test that may scale by 2029, and urges retiring ROAS metrics that lack incrementality.
Cite as: Melissa Gallo. (2026). Retrieved from https://research.agilebrandguide.com/insights/melissa-gallo-media-dollars-should-be-held-to-media-standards-including-i