Why the most consequential shift in advertising right now has nothing to do with where you are placing ads, and everything to do with whether you understood your buyer before you bought the inventory.
Here is a number that should reframe how you think about B2B advertising in 2026.
US advertisers will spend $69.33 billion on retail media this year. Up from $58.79 billion in 2025. A channel that barely registered as a budget line five years ago now accounts for nearly 18% of all US digital ad spending. Retail media is not a niche. It is not a test-and-learn experiment. It is the third pillar of digital advertising, sitting alongside search and social, and it is growing faster than either of them, a shift already explored in depth in our breakdown of retail media advertising and adtech companies.
Retail media will outpace social media networks entirely by 2028. That is the current trajectory.
And most B2B advertisers are watching it happen from the outside.
Not because they have evaluated the channel and found it irrelevant. Because they have not evaluated it at all. The assumption, running quietly beneath most B2B marketing plans, is that retail media is a CPG problem. A Procter and Gamble problem. A sponsored product on Amazon has a problem.
That assumption is now expensive.
What Retail Media Actually Is, Before We Talk About What It Means
The definition has stretched. A lot.
Retail media started as advertising inventory owned by retailers, placed on their own platforms, targeted using their own purchase data. Amazon sells sponsored product placements to brands that want to appear when someone searches for a category. That was the original model.
It worked because it had something other digital channels did not: first-party transactional data. Not behavioral signals. Not modeled audiences. Actual purchase history. A company knows that this specific account, at this specific organization, bought a particular category of product three times in the past year. That is a fundamentally different quality of signal than what Google or Meta ever had.
But the definition has since expanded into territory that directly concerns B2B advertisers. Retail media now includes off-site advertising, where retailers take their first-party audience data and use it to place ads across third-party publisher websites and programmatic exchanges. a structure closely aligned with modern programmatic advertising strategies. It includes connected television integrations. It includes in-store digital signage with closed-loop attribution. It includes the entire concept of a retail media network, or RMN, which is any company that monetizes its audience data and owned inventory to serve advertisers.
There are now 277 retail media networks operating globally as of late 2025. That number is expected to grow. Payment platforms are turning transaction data into advertising infrastructure. Airlines, hotels, and financial services companies are all building media networks on the back of their purchase and behavioral data.
That last part is the B2B entry point.
When a platform that knows the procurement behavior of hundreds of thousands of businesses starts offering advertising inventory targeted to those buyers, that is not a CPG problem anymore. That is your problem. That is your opportunity, or your competitor’s.
The Fragmentation Problem, Which Is Also the Opportunity
Retail media has a fragmentation issue. It is severe enough that analysts talk about it constantly, and it is worth understanding technically before drawing the strategic conclusions.
The average organization is currently working with six retail media networks. a level of ecosystem complexity similar to what brands face when navigating multiple programmatic advertising platforms. That number is projected to reach eleven by 2026. Each network runs its own data infrastructure, its own identity system, its own reporting logic, its own measurement standards. Brands managing campaigns across even five or six of these networks are, in practice, operating in five or six different systems with five or six different versions of what ROI means, a challenge that mirrors broader B2B SaaS marketing ROI measurement issues.
Amazon and Walmart alone will capture 89% of incremental retail media spend in 2026. The remaining 11% is distributed across 275 other networks. Which means the ecosystem is simultaneously dominated by two giants and violently fragmented everywhere else.
The measurement problem is compounding this. Thirty-six percent of marketers cite difficulty proving investment incrementality as a reason they might reduce retail media spend. Another 32% point to lower ROI compared to other channels. These are not complaints about a channel that does not work. There are complaints about a channel where the infrastructure for proving that it works is still being built. Unified measurement across networks, where you can see exposed versus unexposed lift across all your activations in a single view, is only now becoming available at a small number of networks.
Here is the strategic point buried inside all of this technical complexity: the brands that figure out measurement and cross-network attribution now, while most competitors are still confused, will have a data advantage that compounds. In retail media, clarity about what is actually driving results is a competitive asset.
In B2B advertising, that is doubly true. Because the buyer journey you are trying to influence is not a single transaction, it reflects the complexity of modern B2B lead generation strategies. It is a nine-to-twelve-month committee process. The measurement problem in retail media is difficult. The measurement problem in B2B is harder. Any advertiser who gets serious about closed-loop attribution in retail media will have developed capabilities that transfer directly.
The B2B Buyer’s Attention Is the Most Fragmented Thing in Advertising
US B2B digital ad spending reached just over $20 billion in 2025. That number sounds large. Divided across the actual problem it is trying to solve, it looks different.
The average B2B purchase now involves around ten people. Seventy-two percent of B2B purchases involve high-complexity buying groups spanning multiple functions, including IT, operations, finance, and end users. These people are not in the same room. They are not on the same channel. They are not reading the same content or consuming the same media. They move at different speeds and have different concerns. And they are, individually, completing most of their research independently before anyone on the selling side gets involved.
Eighty-three percent of buyers have fully or mostly defined their purchase requirements before speaking with sales. Ninety-four percent are using large language models at some point in their buying process. Seventy-two percent encountered Google’s AI Overviews during their research.
The buying committee’s attention is not fragmented in the way a consumer’s attention is fragmented. A consumer flips between TikTok, YouTube, and email. A B2B buying committee member is doing something more specific and harder to reach: they are conducting private research, consulting peers outside their organization, running their own evaluations, and arriving at conclusions that vendors never get to see or influence. Formal buying committees are giving way to what analysts are now calling fluid networks of influence, where internal stakeholders, external peers, AI agents, and digital communities all shape decisions long before sellers are contacted.
You cannot interrupt your way into that process.
That sentence is the entire strategic case for moving from reactive to proactive B2B advertising.
Reactive Advertising Is Chasing the Buyer After the Decision Has Been Made
Most B2B advertising is reactive, relying heavily on intent triggers and traditional demand generation vs lead generation models. It responds to signals. Someone searches for a keyword: serve them an ad. Someone visits the pricing page: trigger a retargeting sequence. Someone engages with a competitor’s content: launch an ABM campaign targeting their account.
These tactics are not wrong. They work in a narrow sense. They capture demand that already exists. They remind a buyer who already has your brand in their consideration set that you are still there.
But they do nothing about the buyer who has never heard of you. They do nothing about the eight other members of the buying committee who did not trigger the signal. They do nothing about the vendor preference that was formed six months before anyone searched for a keyword.
The Demand Works analysis of B2B buyer intent trends for 2026 frames it clearly: the buyer journey is a series of fragmented micro-moments, and success requires orchestrating immediate, context-aware responses to those moments before they happen. Not after. The strategy that wins is the one that anticipates need rather than reacts to expressed intent.
This is where retail media’s architecture offers a model that B2B advertisers should study, even if the direct application takes a different form.
Retail media works because it places a brand in front of a buyer at the moment of highest commercial intent, using data that describes the buyer’s actual behavior rather than their modeled profile. The sponsored product appears when someone is actively looking for the category. The off-site ad follows a shopper who has demonstrated purchase intent within a specific category across the open web. The in-store digital screen reaches the buyer at the physical point of decision.
The B2B equivalent of this is not a sponsored listing on Amazon. It is being present, with a message that actually fits the buyer’s context, at every point in the long pre-purchase research process that the buying committee is conducting without you.
Seventy-five percent of buyers turn to peers when creating a vendor shortlist. Reinforcing the power of thought leadership in SaaS marketing. Top-of-mind awareness determines whether a vendor is considered at all. Being on the shortlist is the outcome of months of low-level, ambient presence that most B2B advertising plans never account for.
Partnerships Are the Infrastructure of Proactive Advertising
There is a lesson in how the best retail media networks actually work that B2B advertisers miss because they read the surface feature and not the underlying structure.
A retail media network’s value is not the inventory. Amazon has plenty of inventory. The value is the data that makes the inventory addressable. First-party purchase history. Behavioral signals from actual commercial activity. The ability to identify, with precision, which accounts are in an active buying cycle and what they are buying.
No B2B advertiser can build that infrastructure alone. The data is distributed. The buyer’s research happens across dozens of platforms and channels. Their intent signals are generated in places the advertiser has no access to.
This is why partnerships are not a nice-to-have in proactive B2B advertising. They are the mechanism.
The first category of partnership is data. Intent data providers aggregate behavioral signals from across the web, including content consumption, research activity, and engagement patterns at the account level, forming the backbone of behavioral targeting for high-quality leads. They build the dynamic account-level intent profiles that modern B2B buying research describes, consolidating signals from multiple stakeholders within an organization into a picture of the buying committee’s collective needs. This is the retail media first-party data advantage, reconstructed for the B2B context.
The second category is channel. Most B2B buying committees include Millennial and Gen Z members who are digitally native and carry consumer-grade expectations into business purchasing decisions. They are not waiting to be reached by a cold email sequence. They are on LinkedIn, which took 9% of all B2B digital ad spend to $4.59 billion in revenue in 2025, alongside broader social media lead generation strategies. They are watching YouTube. They are in Slack communities, private Discords, and specialized forums. They are consuming creator-led content from individual voices they trust, which is why 73% of leaders in the Edelman study said thought leadership was a more trustworthy basis for assessing vendor capabilities than company marketing.
A proactive advertising strategy is one that maps where each member of the target buying committee spends their attention, aligning closely with structured B2B SaaS growth marketing strategy frameworks. before they are in an active buying cycle, and builds presence at each of those points. Not with generic brand advertising. With content and messages that are specifically calibrated to that member’s role, concern, and stage of awareness.
The third category is the one most B2B advertisers skip entirely: partnerships with the organizations and voices that already have credibility with your target buyers. Retail media’s influencer integration problem, where creator and influencer campaigns remain loosely connected to the broader ecosystem without standardized booking or attribution, maps directly onto B2B’s creator and thought leadership gap. The brands that have figured out how to make individual voices synonymous with the category they sell into do not struggle for attention. Their buyers come to them already believing the value proposition, because they heard it from someone they trusted.
Understanding the Buyer Is Not a Research Project. It Is an Ongoing Practice.
Here is where most B2B advertising plans break down.
They are built on research that was conducted once, at the start of the year, by a team that read a few industry reports and spoke to three existing customers. The ICP was defined. The personas were documented. The messaging framework was finalized. And then the year proceeded, with every campaign running against that static picture of the buyer.
Meanwhile, the actual buyers changed their problem statements an average of 3.2 times during complex purchases in 2025. Fifty-four percent of buying groups are actively evolving their decision-making models. The point of first contact in the sales process moved forward by six to seven weeks in a single year, as economic pressure pushed buyers to engage vendors earlier while still arriving with fully formed requirements.
The retail media model has something useful to say about this, too. The reason RMNs with closed-loop measurement outperform other channels is not that they have better targeting. It is that they have real feedback. They know, from actual transaction data, whether an ad exposure translated into a purchase. That feedback shapes the next campaign. The loop closes, and the system learns.
B2B advertisers who want to move from reactive to proactive need the same loop. Not annual persona refreshes. A continuous feedback mechanism that pulls in what the sales team is hearing, what the support team is seeing, and what the content that is performing is telling you about what buyers are actually worried about right now.
Elsa Dithmer of Auvik puts the content side of this cleanly: high-value content should provide actionable insights that empower buyers. When it is well-optimized, highly relevant, and consistently delivers value, it establishes authority, nurtures prospects, and ultimately accelerates pipeline velocity. The operative word is consistently. A proactive advertising strategy is not a campaign. It is a practice.
The Practical Shape of What This Looks Like
Let’s be concrete.
A proactive B2B advertising program has three layers running simultaneously, each addressing a different part of the buying committee at a different stage of awareness.
The first layer is the ambient authority building. This is the content, the creator partnerships, the thought leadership that runs continuously in the channels where your target buying committee members spend time, whether or not they are in an active buying cycle. It is not optimized for clicks or form submissions. It is optimized for mindshare, for becoming the name that comes up when someone in the committee mentions the category in a peer conversation. This layer is the one that puts you on the shortlist before the search starts.
The second layer is intent-activated precision. This is where the data partnerships matter. When account-level intent signals indicate that a target account is entering an active research phase, the advertising activates at a higher level of specificity. Messages tailored to the committee member’s role. Content that matches the problem framing that purchase research suggests is the primary concern. Coordinated across channels so that the CFO, the CTO, and the operations leader are all seeing relevant material at the same time, even if the material is different for each of them.
The third layer is conversion-stage proof. This is where the reactive advertising that most B2B teams are already doing actually belongs. Retargeting, case studies, competitor comparisons, and ROI calculators. The mechanisms for closing the deal with a buyer who is already on the shortlist. This layer is no less important than the first two. It is simply downstream from them. The mistake most teams make is running only this layer and wondering why the shortlist was already set before they showed up.
Retail media’s closed-loop measurement infrastructure is the model for what holds all three layers together. You need to know which exposures in the first layer are showing up as account-level intent signals in the second, which requires a robust lead tracking system. You need to know which intent-activated campaigns are translating into shortlist inclusions. You need to know, at the account level, whether the investment is working. This requires data partnerships, clean room arrangements with publishers, and the discipline to build attribution models that account for a nine-month buying cycle rather than a seven-day click window.
It is more complex than reactive advertising. It is also the only advertising that reaches buyers before their minds are made up.
The Underlying Shift That Makes All of This Urgent
Gartner’s projection is that by 2027, 95% of B2B buying journeys will begin in a language model. Eighty-nine percent of buyers already name generative AI as one of their most important sources across every phase of purchase.
This changes the reactive advertising equation further. If the buyer is beginning their research in a language model, keyword-triggered advertising does not reach them at the start of the process. It reaches them later, if at all. The language model does not serve banner ads. It synthesizes information from sources it considers authoritative. Which means the B2B advertiser’s job is now, in part, to be the authoritative source that the language model cites, a challenge deeply connected to SEO for SaaS.
That is an SEO and content authority problem as much as an advertising problem. And it is one more reason why the first layer of the proactive strategy, the ambient authority building, is not optional. It is the infrastructure that makes everything else work in a world where the buyer’s first twenty queries about your category go to a chatbot.
The brands that have spent two years consistently producing genuinely useful material about the problems their buyers face, in their own voice, with their own perspective, will be cited. reflecting the long-term discipline outlined in the SaaS content marketing playbook. The brands that produced 85% AI-scored content optimized for keyword clusters will not.
A Thought to Leave With
Retail media reached $165 billion globally in 2026 because it solved a real problem. Advertisers needed to reach buyers with high purchase intent, using data that actually described commercial behavior, in a way that connected ad exposure to sales outcomes.
The B2B advertising problem is structurally identical. Reach the right members of the buying committee. Use data that describes actual commercial behavior and intent. Connect the advertising investment to revenue outcomes in a way the CFO will believe.
The tools exist. The data partnerships are available. The channel mix, from LinkedIn to creator networks to intent-activated programmatic to the emerging retail media networks that are building B2B-relevant inventory, is more sophisticated than it has ever been.
What does not exist, in most B2B organizations, is the will to build the proactive infrastructure before the reactive one fails. Most teams will wait until the pipeline number forces the conversation. Until the marketing-attributed opportunities dry up. Until the sales team starts complaining that they are showing up to deals where the decision has already been made.
By then, the shortlist will have been set for six months.
The buyers who will call you in the second half of 2026 are forming their opinions right now. They are reading content that either includes your voice or does not. They are in conversations with peers who either mention your name or do not. They are doing research in language models that either cite your authority or return someone else’s.
