Liquid Death and Ibotta Execs: Ditch ROAS, Measure Incrementality

Incrementality, not ROAS, reveals the true impact of digital promotions on CPG brands. That is the core argument Benoit Vatere, chief media and digital commerce officer at Liquid Death, and Bryan Leach, founder and CEO of performance marketing platform Ibotta, made in a conversation recorded live at Brandweek 2026 for the Adspeak by ADWEEK podcast.

The two executives tackled a question that has dogged consumer brands for years: can CPG companies measure the true impact of digital promotions in real time, rather than relying on sales figures that may not tell the whole story? Their answer starts with a shift in metric.

The problem, as they framed it, is that conventional return on ad spend can overstate promotional effectiveness. A promo can look like it drove sales when much of that volume would have happened anyway. Incrementality measurement, by contrast, isolates the sales a promotion genuinely created.

The discussion unpacked how brands can bring greater accountability to retail media and in-store promotions through real-time data, matched-audience testing and more rigorous measurement.

What tools did they point to?

Vatere and Leach outlined several practices for identifying genuinely incremental sales and protecting margins:

• Matched-audience testing, which compares promoted and non-promoted consumer groups to isolate true lift.
• Real-time data, which lets brands act on emerging sales signals rather than waiting for quarterly recaps.
• Cost per incremental dollar, a metric the executives said helps protect margins by pricing promotional spend against actual created value.
• Third-party verification, which they called essential for building trust in measured retail media results.

Vatere also shared insight into optimizing promotional spend across retail channels, reducing customer churn and growing household penetration. The executives connected churn reduction directly to household penetration: keep buyers coming back, and the brand reaches more of the home's shopping basket over time.

Who are the executives?

Bryan Leach founded Ibotta, a performance marketing platform that delivers digital promotions to over 200 million consumers. Under his leadership, the Ibotta app has surpassed 50 million downloads and powers digital offer programs for major brands including Walmart, DoorDash and Instacart. In 2024, Leach led Ibotta through the largest tech IPO in Colorado history. A frequent commentator on AI and CPG performance marketing, he previously practiced law at Bartlit Beck LLP and clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter.

Benoit Vatere leads media and digital commerce at Liquid Death and is known for his expertise in performance marketing and digital promotions within the CPG industry. With a background in digital-first brand building, he has pioneered approaches to measuring incremental sales and ROI in retail environments.

Why does the metric shift matter?

For CPG marketers, the stakes are budget allocation. If ROAS overstates promotional effectiveness, brands risk pouring money into promotions that shift existing demand rather than creating new sales. Real-time measurement, the executives argued, enables smarter budget reallocation — moving spend toward what the data shows is working while campaigns are still running, not after the quarter closes.

In short, the takeaway from Brandweek 2026: brands that pair incrementality testing with independent verification will know which promotional dollars actually created sales — and which merely took credit for them.