Retail Media: Hits $71 Billion as Commerce Media Overtakes TV

A Milestone the Advertising Industry Saw Coming But Still Was Not Ready For

The numbers have been building for years, but 2026 marks the crossing point. US retail media spending is projected to reach $71.09 billion this year, according to eMarketer forecasts. Globally, the broader category of commerce media — which includes retail media networks, delivery app advertising, and financial media — is on track to exceed approximately $178 billion, surpassing traditional television advertising for the first time in the history of the medium.

This is not a gradual overtaking. Television advertising has been declining in real terms for nearly a decade, while retail media has been compounding at rates exceeding 25% annually. The intersection was inevitable. What makes it significant is what it reveals about the fundamental restructuring of advertising economics: the locus of ad spending is migrating from where consumers watch to where consumers buy.

The implications ripple across every sector of the media and marketing ecosystem. Television networks face an existential question about their long-term advertising revenue model. Retailers have discovered that their transaction data — the precise record of what people actually purchase — is the most valuable commodity in advertising. And brands are caught in the middle, forced to allocate budgets to channels they do not control, on platforms run by their own retail partners.

The Duopoly Within the Duopoly

If retail media were a country, Amazon would be its superpower. Amazon Advertising alone generates an estimated $52 billion in annual revenue, making it the third-largest digital advertising business in the world behind Google and Meta. Within the US retail media market, Amazon and Walmart together capture approximately 89% of all incremental retail media spending.

Amazon’s dominance stems from a self-reinforcing cycle. More shoppers mean more ad impressions. More ad impressions attract more advertisers. More advertising revenue subsidizes lower product prices and faster delivery, attracting more shoppers. The flywheel has been spinning for years, and competitors have struggled to slow it.

Walmart Connect, the retailer’s advertising arm, has emerged as the clear second player with revenues growing at approximately 30% year-over-year. Walmart’s advantage is physical: with over 4,700 US stores visited by 240 million customers weekly, Walmart can offer what Amazon cannot — in-store advertising tied to physical shopping behavior. The company’s rollout of in-store digital screens and self-checkout advertising is creating a bridge between digital ad targeting and physical retail exposure.

Below the Amazon-Walmart duopoly, a crowded field of contenders is fighting for the remaining market share. Instacart, Kroger, Target (Roundel), Home Depot, and Albertsons all operate retail media networks of varying maturity. Each offers advertisers access to first-party purchase data, but scale remains the fundamental challenge. A brand advertising on Kroger’s network reaches Kroger shoppers; a brand advertising on Amazon reaches nearly everyone.

The consolidation dynamics are already visible. Smaller retail media networks are partnering with demand-side platforms and standardization bodies to offer unified buying across multiple retailers. The Commerce Media Alliance, formed in late 2025, is attempting to create cross-retailer measurement standards so brands can compare performance across networks. Whether this coalition can counterbalance the Amazon-Walmart gravity remains the central strategic question for the rest of the industry.

In-Store Digital: The Physical Frontier

The most underreported story in retail media is the migration from digital screens on websites and apps to digital screens in physical stores. In-store retail media represents a potential $20-30 billion opportunity in the US alone, according to BCG estimates, and it is growing faster than online retail media.

The hardware deployment is accelerating. Walmart has installed digital screens on self-checkout kiosks, end-cap displays, and entrance zones across thousands of stores. Kroger’s EDGE (Enhanced Display for Grocery Environments) program replaces paper shelf labels with digital displays that can serve targeted promotions based on time of day, local inventory, and even weather conditions. Cooler Screens, a startup that places transparent LCD screens on refrigerated and frozen food doors, has expanded to thousands of store locations, serving ads to shoppers at the exact moment of purchase consideration.

The measurement challenge in-store is fundamentally different from online. When a consumer clicks a sponsored product listing on Amazon and purchases it, the attribution is direct and immediate. When a consumer walks past a digital end-cap ad for laundry detergent and later picks up a bottle of that brand in aisle seven, the attribution chain is probabilistic at best. Retailers are deploying a combination of loyalty card data, computer vision (anonymized traffic counting), and mobile location data to close the attribution gap, but advertisers remain skeptical of in-store measurement compared to the precision of digital click-through tracking.

Privacy concerns add another layer. In-store digital advertising that leverages cameras, even for anonymized traffic counting, triggers consumer unease that online cookie-based tracking never did. The physical visibility of a camera on a shelf screen feels more invasive than an invisible tracking pixel, even if the actual data collection is less personal. Retailers navigating in-store media expansion must balance targeting precision against consumer trust.

The Measurement Pressure Cooker

Retail media’s growth has outpaced its measurement infrastructure, and 2026 is the year that gap becomes untenable. Brands are spending tens of billions of dollars across multiple retail media networks, and many cannot answer a basic question: is this spending driving incremental sales, or am I paying for purchases that would have happened anyway?

The incrementality problem is retail media’s original sin. When a consumer searches for “paper towels” on Amazon and clicks a sponsored listing for Bounty, the question is whether that click caused a purchase that would not otherwise have occurred, or whether the consumer was already going to buy Bounty and the ad simply intercepted an inevitable transaction. Studies suggest that a significant portion of retail media spending is non-incremental — brands are effectively paying a tax on their own demand.

The walled-garden problem compounds incrementality concerns. Each retail media network operates its own closed measurement system. Amazon reports Amazon metrics. Walmart reports Walmart metrics. Cross-network comparison is difficult, and unified attribution across retail media, social media, search, and television is nearly impossible. Brands making budget allocation decisions are essentially comparing apples to oranges across every channel.

Industry responses are emerging on multiple fronts. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has published retail media measurement guidelines calling for standardized definitions of viewability, attribution windows, and incrementality testing. Several third-party measurement firms, including Circana, NCSolutions, and Criteo’s Commerce Grid, offer cross-network analytics. But adoption of standardized measurement remains voluntary, and the largest networks have limited incentive to open their data to external verification when their own metrics consistently show strong performance.

The measurement reckoning will likely intensify as CFOs demand the same accountability from retail media budgets that they demand from every other marketing investment. The networks that solve measurement credibly will accelerate their growth. Those that rely on opaque, self-reported metrics will face increasing advertiser skepticism, even as their top-line numbers continue to climb.

What the TV-Overtaking Moment Actually Means

The headline — commerce media surpassing TV advertising — carries symbolic weight beyond its economic significance. Television advertising has been the anchor of brand building for seventy years. Coca-Cola, Nike, Apple, and countless other iconic brands were built through television’s unique combination of sight, sound, motion, and mass reach. The shift of advertising dollars away from TV toward retail media represents a fundamental change in what advertisers value: mass awareness versus purchase-proximate targeting.

Television excels at the top of the marketing funnel. It creates broad awareness and emotional brand associations. Retail media excels at the bottom: it reaches consumers at or near the point of purchase with targeted, performance-measurable messaging. The dollar shift from TV to retail media reflects a broader industry trend toward performance marketing — spending that can be tied directly to sales outcomes rather than brand awareness metrics like reach and frequency.

But the shift is not purely rational. Retail media benefits from the same budgetary dynamics that fueled the growth of digital advertising broadly: measurability bias. Channels that can demonstrate direct, attributable returns attract disproportionate budget share, even if upper-funnel channels like TV generate longer-term brand equity that is harder to measure but no less real. The risk for brands is that over-indexing on retail media creates a “performance trap” — short-term sales are efficiently captured while long-term brand health erodes.

Television is not disappearing. Connected TV (CTV) advertising is growing rapidly, blending TV’s creative canvas with digital targeting capabilities. The most sophisticated advertisers will maintain balanced portfolios across brand-building and performance channels. But the center of gravity has shifted, and it is not shifting back. Retail media’s combination of purchase data, closed-loop measurement, and proximity to the transaction makes it structurally advantaged in an era where every marketing dollar must justify itself.

The Future: Convergence, Not Replacement

The framing of commerce media “overtaking” TV advertising suggests a zero-sum competition, but the reality is convergence. Retail media networks are expanding beyond their own digital properties into programmatic display, connected TV, and social media. Amazon’s demand-side platform (DSP) already enables advertisers to use Amazon purchase data to target consumers across the open web and streaming platforms. Walmart Connect is building similar off-site capabilities.

This expansion blurs the traditional category boundaries. When a consumer sees a Walmart-targeted ad on a streaming service, is that retail media or TV advertising? When Amazon purchase data informs a social media campaign on Instagram, is that retail media or social advertising? The convergence of data and distribution channels is making these categories increasingly artificial.

By 2028, the distinction between retail media and other digital advertising may dissolve entirely. What will remain is a unified commerce-oriented advertising ecosystem where purchase data — the definitive signal of consumer intent — is the currency that underlies all targeting, measurement, and optimization. The retailers who own that data will be the new advertising gatekeepers, inheriting a role that television networks held for decades and that Google and Meta have held for the last twenty years.

For brands, the strategic imperative is clear: invest in first-party data capabilities, build direct relationships with the retail media networks that matter most to your category, demand measurement transparency, and resist the temptation to abandon brand building entirely in favor of performance-measurable retail media. The future belongs to advertisers who can balance both.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources & Further Reading

• US Retail Media Spending Forecast 2026 — eMarketer/Insider Intelligence
• Commerce Media: The New Advertising Superpower — Boston Consulting Group
• Amazon Advertising Revenue and Market Share Analysis — Marketplace Pulse
• In-Store Retail Media: The Next $30 Billion Opportunity — McKinsey & Company
• Retail Media Measurement Standards — Interactive Advertising Bureau