Retail media is booming, and so is the frustration that brands still rely on short-sighted metrics like ROAS to justify multimillion-dollar budgets. Flywheel Digital, an Omnicom-owned commerce tech player, is taking a run at that problem with the launch of its Return on Consumer (ROC) Dashboard, a new analytics product designed to show not just what customers buy today—but the value they’ll deliver over the next 12 months.
The tool taps deeply into Amazon’s shopping, streaming, and browsing signals—data that very few platforms can touch—to measure the complete consumer journey. Built on Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) and enriched with Amazon’s full-funnel Brand Metrics, the ROC Dashboard promises something retail media has been missing: a standardized, predictive measure of long-term customer value.
In a category expected to grow so fast that, by 2030, retail media will outspend global TV advertising (Forrester’s forecast, not Flywheel’s), measuring the right thing has never mattered more.
“Brands don’t just need clearer signals—they need them sooner,” Flywheel CTO Oliver Masting said. “This moves measurement from chasing campaign performance to understanding consumer value.”
Why ROAS Is Starting to Look a Little… Dated
ROAS has served marketers well for a decade, but in a retail media ecosystem increasingly driven by walled-garden data and first-party signals, the metric is showing its age. For campaigns optimized by real-time bidding and machine learning, ROAS mostly tells you how efficiently you bought ads—not whether those ads actually built loyalty, expanded your audience, or improved retention.
Flywheel argues that this is the exact gap its ROC Dashboard fills. Instead of measuring a single transaction, it evaluates how people move through the funnel—from Opportunity to Awareness, Interest, Purchase, and Loyalty—and forecasts their value over the next year.
It’s a shift brands have been asking for, especially as retail media grows into a top-tier budget line. The companies that adopt long-term consumer measurement stand to separate themselves from competitors still stuck optimizing for short-term returns.
Inside the ROC Dashboard: Predictive Power Meets Practical Guidance
The ROC Dashboard doesn’t just hand brands a pile of Amazon data—it translates it into plain-language movement through the funnel, consumer health scores, and forecasting that doesn’t require a Ph.D. in statistics.
Here’s what it delivers:
- Quantifies audience progression across all five funnel stages.
- Classifies consumer states into Active, At-Risk, and Churned.
- Benchmarks performance using standardized health scores versus category competitors.
- Forecasts Return on Consumer, i.e., expected 12-month revenue from shoppers already in the brand’s orbit.
- Offers stage-specific recommendations to recover drop-offs and drive conversions.
- Direct activation (coming soon) will let users push optimizations straight from the dashboard.
That last point may be the most impactful. Analytics platforms are only as useful as the actions they inspire. Embedding activation tools signals Flywheel’s intention to collapse the loop between insight and execution—something Amazon’s ecosystem historically hasn’t made easy.
The Retail Media Stakes Keep Rising
Forrester’s forecast underscores a simple reality: retail media’s influence will soon rival the most entrenched advertising categories. As budgets follow consumers into digital storefronts, measurement must evolve.
Brands that understand long-term consumer value will build loyalty and defensibility. Those clinging to last-click ROAS may find themselves underperforming even while campaigns look “efficient” on paper.
Flywheel is positioning ROC as the next logical step in that evolution. For Omnicom, it strengthens the holding company’s push into outcome-based commerce measurement. For Amazon marketers, it offers something that has long been missing: a unified view of how discovery, consideration, and loyalty interact across the platform.
Competitive Benchmarking: The Missing Piece
Perhaps the most compelling layer is competitive benchmarking. Retail media has no universal yardstick—everyone is measuring success using their own improvised scorecards. Monthly benchmarking gives brands a relative measure of their consumer health and funnel strength versus competitors.
That alone could reshape how retail media budgets are defended in boardrooms.
Flywheel Brings ROC to Amazon Ads unBoxed
The ROC debut is timed with Flywheel’s presence at Amazon Ads unBoxed, where the company will showcase the tool across keynotes, lightning talks, and fireside sessions. Highlights include:
- Product Keynote: Fender & Flywheel: Redefining Growth through Consumer Insights
Nov 11, 9:00 AM CST
Featuring Flywheel COO Christine Gambino and Fender’s Head of Marketing. - Lightning Talk: Evolving Beyond ROAS: The Return on Consumer Revolution
Nov 11, 1:00 PM CST - Partner Keynote: Building Long-Term Growth: Flywheel, Liquid I.V., and Tinuiti
Nov 11, 3:30 PM CST
Flywheel’s message is clear: ROC isn’t just another dashboard. It’s a philosophy shift—one that treats consumers as long-term assets rather than short-term conversion events.
The Big Picture: Accountability Is the New Currency
Retail media’s next phase is about accountability. Every brand wants to know that its Amazon dollars are producing durable value, not just momentary spikes. Flywheel’s ROC Dashboard pushes that idea forward with a more holistic measurement model, tying marketing investment to long-term consumer relationships—and giving brands a roadmap to grow those relationships over time.
If ROAS is the speedometer, ROC is the engine diagnostics. One tells you how fast you’re going. The other tells you whether you’ll make it to the destination.
