The Big Shift: Redefining ROI with return on consumer

In this episode of Office Hours, Danny Hoffman and Mike Feldman discuss Flywheel's new white paper "The Big Shift" and why retail media is fundamentally changing how brands should measure success. They discuss why ROAS creates bad habits by chasing short-term attributable sales instead of focusing on driving households, units, and overall consumer return. They explore the shift from traditional metrics to "return on consumer", a mental model that leverages Amazon Marketing Cloud's five-year lookback data to understand true long-term impact.

Key topics include: -Why brand search vs. category search reveals ROAS limitations -How "new to brand" metrics can be misleading across retailers -The bottom-up retail approach vs. traditional brand-down thinking -Using consumer ID over SKU-focused strategies -The role of creator affiliates as the next big shift in retail media This conversation provides actionable insights for marketers looking to move beyond philosophy to provable, accountable metrics in the evolving retail media landscape.