Beyond the standard AI and measurement buzz, discover the hidden shifts in agentic commerce and data licensing that will redefine retail media winners in 2026.
Retail media has spent the last two years graduating from a nice-to-have budget line into something brands treat as a core performance channel. The money reflects it.
US retail media ad spend is projected to reach $69 billion in 2026- up from $60 billion in 2025. Europe grew 22% year over year, compared to an overall 6% for total ad spend. The market is not slowing down.
With growth like that comes a lot of trend pieces. Most of them are saying the same things: the measurement is broken, off-site is growing, AI is everywhere, and in-store is finally catching up. All true. All is already on your radar.
This piece covers those, but it also decodes the trends those pieces are quietly skipping. The ones that will matter more by Q4 than anything currently getting the headline inches.
The Retail Media Trends Everyone Is Covering
A. Measurement is still the industry’s biggest unsolved problem
Every retail media trends piece leads with this. With good reason, because it’s still not fixed.
Each network runs its own attribution model, conversion definition, and reporting format. A brand buying on Amazon, Walmart, and three regional grocery networks simultaneously is reconciling five different methodologies to answer one question: which of these is actually working?
36% of marketers say difficulty proving incrementality is the main reason they would pull back overall retail media spend.
Did the campaign drive new sales, or did it intercept purchases that would have occurred anyway? Most networks cannot answer that question cleanly.
The IAB has pushed for standardization.
Individual networks have their own incentives to keep their methodology proprietary. Progress is happening, but it is slow, and in the meantime, brands are making budget allocation decisions on incomplete information.
B. Off-Site Is Where the Growth Is
The ceiling on on-site sponsored listings is visible. Only so many slots on a search results page, and as more brands bid for them, CPCs climb and efficiency drops.
The growth move is off-site: leveraging the retailer’s first-party shopper data to reach those same shoppers on external publisher inventory, CTV, programmatic display, and social. The data travels without the real estate having to be owned.
Amazon DSP advertisers grew their spend 31% year over year in Q4 2025 as impressions climbed 32%. Over 60% of Walmart’s self-serve display spend now goes to off-site inventory.
The shift is already well underway.
C. In-store is finally getting serious infrastructure
80% of consumer spending happens in physical stores. Until recently, nearly all retail media advertising was digital-only. That gap made no business sense, and it is closing.
Digital endcap screens, checkout lane displays, and programmatic digital out-of-home tied to loyalty data. In-store retail media is getting real infrastructure behind it. And what matters most is that in-store placements can now be tied to purchase data, as digital placements can.
Closed-loop attribution at the shelf is no longer a future roadmap item.
D. AI in campaign management
Dynamic creative optimization, predictive audience targeting, automated bidding, and real-time personalization. AI is layering into every part of retail media operations.
The more interesting AI story, though, is not in the ad tech stack. It’s what AI is about to do to the shopper side. More on that shortly.
The Trends Most Pieces Are Not Covering
1. Agentic Commerce Is the Threat Nobody Wants to Talk About Directly
AI shopping agents are already in early deployment. Tools that browse, compare, and purchase on a user’s behalf, surfacing a ranked shortlist of products rather than a full search results page.
Here’s why retail media has a problem with this.
Retail media is built on the premise that a shopper is browsing, searching, scrolling, and encountering a sponsored placement at the moment of consideration. An AI agent does not browse. It does not scroll. It processes inputs and returns a recommendation. The sponsored listing that sits at the top of a human’s search results page may not exist in an agent’s output at all.
Nobody has a clean answer to this yet.
The honest position is that if AI agents become a meaningful percentage of shoppers who discover and purchase products, the economics of on-site retail media change significantly.
The networks that are building for that scenario now, rather than waiting to see if it scales, are the ones that will not be caught unprepared.
Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol, developed with Walmart and other major retailers, is an early sign that the industry knows this is coming. It is designed to let AI agents handle discovery and checkout while keeping retailers as the merchant of record.
This framing matters: it is a defensive move dressed up as an innovation announcement.
2. The Revenue Versus Volume Disconnect Brands Are Not Talking About
Something interesting is happening across CPG brands running retail media at scale. Revenue numbers look healthy. Volume numbers are not keeping up.
The interpretation that is skipped in most trend pieces: retail media is increasingly effective at capturing existing demand and intercepting high-intent buyers who were already purchasing. What it is less good at is building the kind of upper-funnel awareness that creates new demand and grows category volume.
Brands are spending on retail media, seeing revenue, and quietly watching their total volume base not grow predictably. The media mix model says one thing.
The quarterly volume report says another. And because legacy MMMs were built for quarterly analysis in a market that shifts week to week, by the time the insight surfaces, the budget window has already closed.
The brands that crack this in 2026 will be the ones treating retail media as a full-funnel channel, not a lower-funnel capture tool, and building the measurement infrastructure to tell the difference in real-time rather than in the next planning cycle.
3. Store Mode in Retailer Apps Is the Most Underrated Inventory in Retail Media
The in-store trend gets covered as endcap screens and digital signage. That framing misses the more interesting development.
Retailer apps running in store mode are turning the shopper’s phone into the most responsive inventory in the building. Real-time offers triggered by aisle location. Scan-and-go integrations that know what’s in the basket as it’s being built.
Navigation that surfaces a sponsored alternative one shelf over from where the shopper is standing.
That is not a future capability.
Walmart, Kroger, and Target have active store mode features in their apps. The brands running sponsored placements inside those experiences are getting a context that no other format can replicate: the shopper is physically in the store, the product is within arm’s reach, and the ad serves at the exact moment the purchase decision is made.
Most retail media budget allocation conversations do not include this inventory. They will.
4. The Creative Problem Nobody Is Counting as a Trend
Measurement gets every hot take. Creative gets almost none. That is backwards.
Most retail media creative is still built to a format spec sheet: fit the dimensions, meet the file size, include the logo. The strategy ends there. And then brands spend significant money running ads that function as digital wallpaper because the creative was never built for the context in which it runs.
Sponsored product on Amazon does not require the same creative thinking as a CTV spot running against a shopper who bought from the brand twice in the last ninety days. An off-site programmatic placement targeting lapsed buyers demands different messaging than an on-site placement competing for a new customer mid-search. These are different conversations.
Most brands have one conversation across all of them.
Retail media networks running purpose-built creative designed for specific placements and shopper contexts consistently outperform generic assets. The performance gap is not marginal.
Brands treating creative as an afterthought in their retail media strategy are underperforming on their own media spend.
The networks that start functioning as creative partners, helping brands build assets that belong in each format and context, will pull advertiser spend from those handing over an ad server and label it a service.
5. Non-Advertising Revenue Is Becoming Bigger Than the Ad Business
Most retail media coverage focuses on ad spend. The more significant long-term development is what sits next to it.
Retailers are learning that their data is worth more as a licensed asset than it is as a targeting tool for their own ad inventory. Data licensing to brands, strategic research partnerships, and insights feeds that help manufacturers understand their own category dynamics at the retail level. These are not advertising products. They are intelligence products.
IAB Europe projects that by 2026, over 60% of retail media network revenue growth will come from non-advertising services, including data licensing and strategic brand collaborations. The ad business funded the data infrastructure.
The data infrastructure is now its own business.
The retailers building toward this are thinking about their networks differently than the ones still treating retail media purely as an ad monetization play. One group is building a media business. The other is building a data and intelligence business that has media on top.
The Through-Line Across All of the Retail Media Trends
Retail media in 2026 is not one channel maturing. It entails several distinct capabilities, some well understood, some still being figured out, all moving at different speeds within organizations that were not originally built to run them.
The brands getting strong returns share one characteristic: they are treating retail media as a strategic function that requires its own thinking, its own creative, its own measurement framework, and its own seat at the planning table.
The ones struggling are the ones who handed the login to a junior team member and asked them to manage the sponsored products budget.
Both groups are spending. Only one of them knows what they are buying.
