The Retail Razor Show

There are genuine, actionable insights - particularly the incremental ROAS reality check, the counter-narrative that most retailers are under-monetized on-site, and the performance-myopia warning for CTV - but they're diluted by host banter, repeated affirmations, and stretches of general retail media overview that adds little for a knowledgeable operator.

“the numbers on like an Average ROAS in CPG for, for retail media can be a 3 or a 4 for, for on site. That's not the return you're really getting. Like yeah, a good return, incremental return on something like that might be a $50. That's a 50% true return on investment”

“brands are always like, I can't squeeze anything more out of my marketing budget. I Max, I'm like, no you're not. You're misspending half of it.”

Lipsman offers a few genuinely counter-consensus positions - retailers not being maxed out on-site, agencies being asleep at the wheel, and the 'brand ROAS stacking' concept - but much of the episode rehashes his own 'third wave' thesis and standard retail media talking points that have circulated widely since 2021-2022.

“let me start with the idea of maxing out inventory on their own sites. This is talked about all the time and it is largely not true”

“retail media has a reputation problem with CMOs. I'll just want about it still see it as an e commerce channel”

Lipsman is a credible, long-tenured retail media analyst with genuine category expertise and primary sourcing (e.g., direct NRF interviews with retailer execs), but he is an analyst-consultant who works the speaking circuit rather than an operator who has personally deployed budgets or built an RMN at scale.

“When it first started to come into my crosshairs. It was 2018 Ed Marketer. It was just realization that Amazon already had almost a $10 billion business”

“Nordstrom I interviewed at nrf, I want to say now, three years ago and on stage there they admitted a Aaron Dunford that I think he said 60% of, of their revenue at the time was off site”

The episode features several named examples with figures - P&G's $200M programmatic cut, Amazon's ~$10B 2018 business, Nordstrom's 60% off-site revenue, Uber's fraud discovery - but some numbers are cited loosely ('almost 10 years ago,' 'I think') and the hosts' stats from eMarketer/Sky reports are not interrogated with enough precision.

“PNG was that almost 10 years ago now? I think they cut like 200 million in their programmatic spend and unknown”

“Amazon already had almost a $10 billion business. So it wasn't a non existent thing. It was just flying under the radar”

The hosts occasionally land pointed questions (asking for a concrete normal ROAS range for CTV, probing whether CMOs are actually shifting behavior) but Ricardo's questions are chronically long and self-answering, there is essentially zero pushback or productive disagreement, and Casey's interruptions add color rather than challenge.

“What's normal and what's really good just for our audience on like how this is being tracked? I'd just be curious on what level is that, uh, even at right now”

“So are these, do you see these as good strong examples of that blending of on site and off site media to improve the overall experience”