When Loyalty Isn’t Enough
The Case for Geo + Context
By Brian Pozesky“We don’t need portfolio optimization or measurement standardization — or whatever you call it. 80% of our sales are tracked with loyalty data.”
“Get with the times, man.”
It’s a valid argument — loyalty programs have become critical infrastructure for retail media. They enable identity resolution at scale, power high-frequency personalization across digital and direct channels, and provide granular attribution tied to verified transactions. For creative performance and short-cycle ROI analysis, they are indispensable.
However, loyalty data is not without limitations. Its strength lies in precision, not coverage. Consumer graphs built from loyalty programs vary significantly across retailers and cannot be uniformly extended across the increasingly fragmented media ecosystem. They lack the interoperability and cross-channel consistency required to evaluate diverse media tactics — from linear TV to emerging programmatic platforms — in a comparable, apples-to-apples fashion. Even the largest holding companies continue to wrestle with stitching together these siloed datasets into coherent, actionable insights.
That’s where geo-based measurement offers complementary value.
Store trade area methodologies provide a standardized, spatial framework for assessing causal media impact at scale.
By anchoring measurement to physical retail outcomes — which still account for over 80% of CPG sales — geo-lift enables portfolio-level evaluation that is agnostic to ID resolution, cookie fidelity, or channel-specific tagging.
In essence, it restores a common unit of analysis: the store
Of course, the utility of geo-lift depends entirely on the fidelity of the underlying trade areas. Naïve radius-based models fail to reflect actual consumer behavior. The most advanced approaches incorporate anonymized GPS signal data, visit frequency, dwell time, and competitive context to delineate trade areas that reflect real-world shopping patterns — not just theoretical reach.
Used in tandem, loyalty and geo provide a uniquely holistic view: loyalty delivers precision and shopper-level insight; geo provides standardization and comparability across the media mix. Together, they enable a more complete understanding of what’s working, where, and why — and allow marketers to balance personalization with portfolio optimization across an increasingly complex retail media landscape.
