There have been two defining moments in the history of digital advertising. The first was Google's transformation of search intent into a transactional medium — the ability to place an ad in front of someone at the exact moment they were looking for what you sell. The second was Facebook's discovery that social graph data could be used to target audiences with a precision that broadcast media had never approached.
We are now in the middle of the third. Retail Media Networks — advertising ecosystems built on top of retailers' own first-party purchase data — are on track to surpass $70 billion in US ad spend in 2026 alone, growing faster than the broader digital advertising market. Globally, the retail media market is approaching $165 billion. By 2028, analysts project it will account for one in every four dollars spent on digital advertising worldwide.
What makes this moment different from the previous two waves is that retail media does something neither search nor social could ever fully deliver: it connects advertising spend directly to purchase outcomes, with closed-loop attribution, using first-party data that belongs entirely to the retailer and does not depend on third-party cookies or probabilistic modelling. In a privacy-first world where every other targeting mechanism is under pressure, retail media is structurally advantaged.
This post is a comprehensive guide to what retail media is, why it is growing so fast, what the landscape actually looks like in 2026, and how serious media buyers should be approaching it.
$70B
US retail media ad spend projected for 2026
11
average RMNs brands will work with by end of 2026
76%
of purchases still happen in physical stores in 2026
What Is a Retail Media Network — and Why Does the Data Advantage Matter So Much?
A Retail Media Network (RMN) is an advertising platform built by a retailer — or a company that facilitates commerce — that allows brands to reach shoppers using the retailer's own first-party data. The most well-known example is Amazon Advertising. But the ecosystem now extends far beyond Amazon to include Walmart Connect, Target's Roundel, Kroger Precision Marketing, Instacart Ads, and dozens of others across grocery, pharmacy, home improvement, fashion, and increasingly non-retail categories like travel and financial services.
The data advantage of retail media is not subtle. It is structural. While Google and Meta infer purchase intent from search queries and social behaviour, retailers have direct, verified transaction-level data. They know exactly what you bought, when you bought it, how often you repurchase, which categories you shop, and what price points trigger conversion. This is not modelled or probabilistic — it is actual behavioural data from real transactions.
For a brand advertising on a retail media network, this means something profound: you are not targeting audiences based on their predicted likelihood to buy. You are targeting based on demonstrated purchase behaviour. The person seeing your sponsored product listing for a protein bar on a grocery retailer's platform is not someone who browsed a fitness website — they are someone who has bought protein bars before, in this store, recently.
Why This Matters in a Privacy-First World
Third-party cookies are eroding. Mobile identifiers are restricted. Probabilistic audience modelling is becoming less reliable. Against this backdrop, retailers sitting on mountains of verified, consented, first-party purchase data have become some of the most valuable advertising partners in the industry. The advantage is not going away — if anything, it will widen as alternative tracking methods become harder to use.
The Retail Media Landscape in 2026: From Amazon to Your Local Grocery Chain
The retail media ecosystem in 2026 is simultaneously concentrated at the top and expanding rapidly at the edges. Understanding the landscape is essential before allocating any budget.
The Dominant Players: Amazon and Walmart
Amazon and Walmart will capture over 89% of incremental retail media spending in 2026. Amazon Advertising is, by itself, the third largest digital advertising business in the world, behind only Google and Meta. Its sponsored product listings, display ads, DSP, and streaming video inventory on Prime Video make it effectively a full-funnel advertising ecosystem in its own right — not just a retail advertising channel.
Walmart Connect has matured rapidly. With access to Walmart's first-party data across its enormous physical and digital footprint, it offers something Amazon cannot: genuine dominance in physical grocery retail, combined with a growing digital platform. For CPG brands trying to influence purchase at the point of sale, Walmart's in-store media network — a rolling expansion of digital screens across its stores — is becoming a critical channel.
The Mid-Tier Networks: Where Specialist Data Creates Advantage
Beyond Amazon and Walmart, a growing tier of specialist retail media networks offer something the giants cannot: category-specific depth and contextual precision. Kroger Precision Marketing reaches grocery shoppers with pharmacy data layered in. Target's Roundel has strong household penetration data and a wealthy, digitally-engaged shopper profile. Home Depot and Lowe's are building networks aimed at contractors and home improvement buyers — a high-value, high-intent audience that is extremely difficult to reach through generalist platforms.
These networks are increasingly being used by advertisers not as alternatives to Amazon but as complements — building full purchase funnel strategies that use a major network for volume and specialist networks for precision.
Commerce Media Beyond Retail: Banks, Airlines, Rideshare
The most significant expansion of the retail media concept in 2026 is into non-retail commerce categories. Companies that facilitate transactions and hold first-party customer data are realising they have the same structural advantage as retailers. Chase Media Solutions allows advertisers to reach customers based on actual purchase history across merchants. PayPal's advertising division uses transaction data from hundreds of millions of consumers. Klarna offers in-app ad placements tied to buy-now-pay-later purchase behaviour. Airlines, hotel chains, and rideshare platforms are building their own advertising businesses on top of booking and travel intent data.
This broader category — often called Commerce Media Networks — represents the next frontier. The data is different from retail (travel intent versus purchase history, financial behaviour versus grocery shopping) but the structural advantage is the same: first-party, transaction-linked, consented data that connects advertising to real commercial behaviour.
The Fragmentation Reality
Brands working across retail media in 2026 engage with an average of six different retail media networks today — a number projected to reach eleven by the end of the year. Each network has different data systems, different reporting standards, different creative requirements, and different measurement methodologies. This fragmentation is the single biggest operational challenge in retail media right now, and managing it without a clear strategy wastes more budget than almost any other media buying mistake.
Retail Media Is No Longer Just a Bottom-Funnel Channel
One of the most significant strategic shifts in retail media in 2026 is the expansion of its role from a pure performance channel — where you buy a sponsored listing to capture someone ready to purchase — into a full-funnel advertising ecosystem.
For most of its existence, retail media was used almost exclusively at the bottom of the funnel. Sponsored Products: capturing someone searching for a category you compete in. Sponsored Display: retargeting someone who viewed your product but did not convert. The logic was transactional: find a buyer at the moment of purchase decision and influence them.
In 2026, 40% of media buyers now use retail media networks across the entire shopping journey. The new formats making this possible are video, audio, CTV, and in-store digital screens — and the implications for media strategy are significant.
CTV Through Retail Data: The Most Powerful Combination in Advertising
The integration of retail media data with Connected TV advertising is genuinely new and genuinely powerful. Amazon's ability to serve streaming ads on Prime Video and attribute them to purchases in its store is the clearest example — but the model is expanding. Walmart has partnered with streaming platforms. Kroger's data is being applied to CTV campaigns through programmatic pipes. The result is a targeting combination that has never previously been possible: the verified, purchase-level first-party data of retail media, deployed in the high-attention, low-fraud environment of connected television.
For brand advertisers who have struggled to connect TV spending to actual sales outcomes, this is the solution they have been waiting for. For performance-oriented media buyers, it is a new channel that combines the accountability of retail media with the awareness-building capability of premium video.
In-Store Digital Media: The Final Frontier
The most underdeveloped and fastest-growing area of retail media in 2026 is in-store. Despite the overwhelming focus on digital channels, 76% of purchases in 2026 still happen in physical stores. The moment a customer is walking through a store with a product in their hand — or standing at a shelf deciding between two options — is the highest-intent moment in the entire purchase journey. And until recently, it was almost entirely unmeasured and undermonetised by retail media networks.
That is changing rapidly. Major US retailers including Kroger, Albertsons, and Walmart are aggressively rolling out in-store digital screen networks. These are not static poster replacements — they are programmatically addressable, data-driven displays that can serve contextually relevant content based on real-time signals including inventory levels, time of day, local weather, and shopper demographics inferred from store visit patterns. A sunscreen brand can serve creative on a screen near the summer display when temperatures spike. A beer brand can activate near the spirits aisle on a Friday afternoon.
The measurement is becoming genuine too. Closed-loop attribution — tying an in-store ad exposure to a purchase made at the checkout using loyalty card data — is being rolled out by the leading networks, giving brands actual proof of sales impact rather than proxy metrics.
The In-Store Opportunity Is Massively Underpriced Right Now
In-store retail media is in the same position that programmatic display was in 2012: the inventory exists, the technology is arriving, and most advertisers have not yet built it into their plans. The brands that move early will buy in-store inventory at rates that will look extraordinary in retrospect. The window is open, but it will not stay open indefinitely.
The Measurement Problem — and Why It Is Finally Being Solved
The single biggest barrier to retail media maturity has been measurement. Not the lack of data — retail media networks have abundant data — but the lack of standardisation, comparability, and independent verification across networks.
The problem was structural. Each retail media network measured performance using its own methodology, its own attribution windows, and its own definitions of key metrics. A ROAS figure from Amazon could not be meaningfully compared to a ROAS figure from Walmart, because the two numbers were calculated differently. Advertisers managing multiple networks were essentially comparing apples to different-shaped apples, and could not make rational cross-network budget allocation decisions.
In 2026, meaningful progress is being made on this problem, driven by three developments:
Incrementality Measurement Is Becoming Standard
The industry is moving decisively toward incrementality as the primary performance metric — measuring not whether sales happened after an ad was served, but whether those sales would have happened anyway without the ad. This matters enormously for retail media because of the channel's proximity to purchase: a sponsored listing that serves an ad to someone who was already going to buy your product looks great on a ROAS report but has added zero value. Incrementality testing reveals which spend is genuinely driving new demand versus simply claiming credit for existing behaviour.
Independent Verification Is Replacing Self-Reported Metrics
Advertisers are increasingly refusing to accept performance data reported solely by the retailers whose platforms they are buying on. Third-party measurement providers are being brought in to independently verify impression delivery, audience composition, and sales attribution. This mirrors the evolution that brand safety measurement went through in programmatic display several years ago — and it is long overdue.
Unified Reporting Infrastructure Is Emerging
Technology platforms that allow brands to manage campaigns across multiple retail media networks from a single interface — with standardised reporting and comparable metrics — are becoming essential infrastructure for serious retail media advertisers. Without this, managing eleven networks (the projected average by year end) is operationally impossible without a dedicated team for each one.
Only 15% of Advertisers Strongly Trust Their Retail Media Measurement
That figure from the 2026 State of Retail Media Report is both alarming and clarifying. It means the majority of brands allocating budget to retail media are doing so without confidence in whether it is working. The solution is not to avoid the channel — the data advantage is too significant to ignore. The solution is to build proper measurement infrastructure: incrementality testing, independent verification, and unified reporting that gives you a genuine picture of what each network is actually delivering.
How to Build a Retail Media Strategy in 2026: A Practical Framework
Given the size of the opportunity and the genuine complexity of the landscape, here is how Roevex approaches retail media strategy for advertisers entering or scaling this channel.
Start with Where Your Customer Actually Buys
Retail media strategy should begin with purchase behaviour, not platform popularity. The right retail media network is the one where your target customers actually shop — not necessarily the biggest one. A premium pet food brand may find that Chewy's retail media network outperforms Amazon because Chewy's shopper base skews more toward the premium segment. A home improvement brand's best ROI may come from the Home Depot network rather than a generalist platform. Map your customer's purchase journey first, then select networks accordingly.
Separate New-to-Brand from Existing Customer Objectives
One of the most common retail media mistakes is using the same campaign to pursue two fundamentally different objectives: reaching new customers who have never bought your product, and retargeting existing customers to drive repeat purchase. These require different placements, different creative, different measurement frameworks, and frankly different budget sources. New-to-brand growth should be measured on incrementality. Retention campaigns on repeat purchase rate and customer lifetime value.
Build a Test-and-Scale Discipline
The fragmented nature of retail media — with every network having different formats, targeting capabilities, and creative requirements — makes testing essential before committing large budgets. Run structured tests on each network, measure genuine incrementality, and scale aggressively on what works. Do not spread budget thinly across many networks simultaneously hoping something sticks. Concentrate, measure, then expand.
Treat In-Store as a Distinct Channel with Distinct Creative
In-store digital screens are not simply digital display running in a physical environment. The context is fundamentally different: a shopper is physically present in the category, already in purchase mode, potentially holding a product. Creative that works for an online display campaign — brand story, lifestyle imagery, longer messaging — will underperform in-store. In-store creative needs to be immediate, product-focused, and oriented toward the specific purchase decision the shopper is making right now. Develop dedicated in-store creative rather than repurposing digital assets.
Invest in Measurement Before Scaling Budget
Do not increase retail media budgets faster than your ability to measure their incremental impact. Set up incrementality testing frameworks, establish baseline purchase rates for your products across networks, and build cross-network reporting that gives you comparable data. The brands that scale retail media successfully in 2026 are the ones with the measurement infrastructure to know, with confidence, which networks are driving genuine growth.
Final Thoughts
Retail media is not a supplementary channel any more. It is not a line item that CPG brands bolt onto their digital plans. It is becoming one of the three pillars of digital advertising — alongside search and social — and it is the one most structurally aligned with the direction the industry is moving: first-party data, closed-loop attribution, and direct connection between advertising spend and commercial outcomes.
The timing is still early enough to build genuine advantage. The brands and advertisers that understand the landscape, invest in measurement infrastructure, and develop a coherent cross-network strategy in 2026 will have a meaningful head start over those who are still treating retail media as an Amazon Sponsored Products afterthought.
The third wave is here. The question is whether your media strategy is built to ride it.