What Is Retail Media? A 2026 Guide for Brands

Retail media is advertising that runs on a retailer's own properties (its website, its app, and increasingly its in-store screens), targeted using that retailer's first-party shopper data. Brands buy it to reach people who are already shopping. Retailers sell it because it turns their audience into a second revenue stream alongside the products on the shelf.

Why retail media matters now

Retail media is no longer a side channel. WARC puts the global market at roughly $200 billion in 2026, around 16% of all advertising spend worldwide. That makes it one of the largest categories in the industry rather than an emerging one.

Three things got it there, and the one people usually name isn't among them.

Start with proximity. A shopper looking at cereal on a grocery site is closer to buying cereal than that same person is anywhere else on the internet. Advertising in that moment converts better, and the retailer can prove it did, because the ad and the purchase happen inside the same system.

Then there's the network count. Brands aren't running one retail media network. They're running a set. Advertisers work across an average of six today and expect to be on eleven by the end of 2026, according to research from Skai and Stratably covering 166 retail media advertisers. More than 150 networks exist globally. That's the operational story of retail media in 2026, and it's where most of the difficulty now lives.

The third shift is physical. In-store retail media (screens at the entrance, on the shelf edge, at the till) moved from pilot to rollout during 2026. It's still a small line item: eMarketer expects US in-store retail media to cross $1 billion by 2029, under 1% of total retail media. But 83.7% of retail sales still happen in physical stores, so the gap between where people buy and where the advertising budget goes is wide, and it's closing.

What is retail media?

Retail media is advertising sold by a retailer, shown to that retailer's shoppers, and targeted with data the retailer collects directly.

It splits three ways:

• Onsite. Ads on the retailer's website or app. Sponsored products in search results, banners on category pages, product carousels.
• Offsite. Ads shown elsewhere on the internet, but targeted using the retailer's shopper data. Social, display, connected TV.
• In-store. Digital screens in the physical store. Entrance displays, shelf-edge screens, smart carts, self-checkout.

What ties all three together is the data, not the placement. A retailer knows what you bought, what you searched, and what you put back. That makes their targeting sharper than most alternatives and their reporting more direct, because they can see the sale at the other end.

Ads also borrow some of the retailer's standing. A product promoted inside a store someone already shops at regularly reads differently from the same product in a banner on the open web.

One benefit rarely gets mentioned. Media revenue gives retailers a source of margin that isn't the price on the shelf. A retailer earning well from advertising is under less pressure to raise prices, because raising prices costs them shoppers, traffic and ad revenue at the same time.

What is a retail media network?

A retail media network, or RMN, is the advertising business a retailer runs on top of its own channels: the ad formats, the targeting data, the buying interface and the reporting.

Retail media sits inside what's traditionally been called shopper marketing, and it covers advertising both on the retailer's own domains and off them.

Europe's market is more fragmented than the US one, which is part of why running several networks is normal here rather than exceptional:

• Tesco Media & Insight Platform. Built on Dunnhumby data science and more than 20 million Clubcard holders, with one of the larger in-store screen estates in Europe.
• Carrefour Links. The dominant network in France, and the most-cited European retail media case study.
• Nectar360. Sainsbury's network, spanning food, non-food and general merchandise through Argos.
• Zalando Marketing Services. Pan-European and fashion-led.
• REWE Digital Ads. Germany.

The US networks are the ones most often used as scale benchmarks: Amazon Advertising, Walmart Connect, Kroger Precision Marketing, Target's Roundel, Criteo Retail Media and Instacart Ads.

The differences between them are not cosmetic. Each has its own ad specs, its own rules on claim substantiation and CTA wording, its own reporting definitions, and its own creative approval queue. Nothing standardizes across them. That's the cost of running six, and the reason eleven is a genuinely different problem rather than the same one at higher volume.

Retail media ad formats

Several networks also support shoppable formats, where the ad carries an add-to-cart action rather than a click through to a product page.

Most campaigns use several. The usual advice is to pilot an unfamiliar format on a small budget before committing a season to it, and it's worth repeating because it's usually ignored.

What to use retail media for

Retail media rewards a specific objective and punishes a vague one. The objective decides the audience, the format, the creative and how you judge whether it worked, so settling it first isn't a planning formality.

The five that come up most:

1. Drive sales or share within one retailer. The default, and the easiest to measure.
2. Reactivate lapsed buyers. People who bought the category, or bought from you, and stopped.
3. Increase margin. Pushing premium lines rather than volume.
4. Grow share against a competitor. Targeting people who buy the category from someone else.
5. Launch a product. Buying visibility where the category is already being browsed.

One trap worth naming. It's tempting to target only heavy category buyers, because the return looks excellent. It looks excellent because you're largely paying to reach people who were going to buy anyway. Incremental reach is the harder buy and usually the more valuable one.

Building the audience

Retail media targeting doesn't work like broadcast targeting. You aren't buying an age bracket. You're buying behavior the retailer has actually observed: what someone bought, how often, what they browsed and put back.

Combine the retailer's data with your own. Networks give you access to loyalty and purchase data, and it gets considerably more useful matched against your own CRM and customer records. That's what lets you tell the difference between someone who already buys from you and someone who buys the category from a competitor.

Build a different audience for each retailer. A supermarket's shoppers behave differently from a marketplace's subscribers, and a segment that performs at one network can be worthless at another. Audiences aren't portable, even when the definition looks identical written down.

How retail media is bought and priced

Most networks sell on one of three models, and which one you get depends on the format rather than on negotiation.

Auction, priced per click. Sponsored product listings almost always work this way. You bid against other brands for a keyword or a category placement and pay when someone clicks. It behaves like paid search, and the same discipline applies.

Auction or reserved, priced per thousand impressions. Onsite display, video and offsite placements usually price on CPM. Some networks run these as an open auction; others reserve them for brands buying against a commitment.

Fixed fee. Homepage takeovers, category sponsorships and most in-store screen inventory are sold as a slot for a period rather than an auction. These carry the highest minimums and the longest lead times, which is also why their creative deadlines bite hardest.

Access splits two ways. The larger networks offer a self-serve interface for the auction formats and a managed service for everything else, usually with a minimum spend attached. Smaller and newer networks are often managed-only, which means an account manager, an insertion order and a slower cycle. Budget the lead time, not just the money.

Running and optimizing a campaign

Retail media isn't a set-and-forget buy. The cycle is short and the levers are ordinary ones.

Optimize to the objective, not to cost per click. A cheap click on a product nobody puts in their cart isn't a good outcome. Watch the metrics closer to the sale, including add-to-cart rate, conversion rate and units sold, alongside clicks and spend.

Rotate creative and retire what loses. Networks rarely volunteer which execution is winning. Running several and cutting the weak ones is the cheapest performance gain available, and it's the step most teams skip, because producing the variants is the bottleneck.

Review bids, budgets, audiences and placement mix on a cadence. Segments get narrowed or widened mid-flight depending on how they perform, and moving money between placements and between networks during the campaign matters more than the accuracy of the original plan.

Line the campaign up with what's happening in the store. Retail media works harder when the online activity matches the in-store promotion. Some networks let you restrict sponsored product campaigns to the stores actually running an offer, and geo-targeting display to shoppers near those stores keeps the advertising specific rather than generic. It's worth giving store teams sight of the creative too, so the shelf and the screen say the same thing.

Measuring retail media properly

This is where most retail media programs are weakest, and it's worth more attention than the media plan.

ROAS is not incrementality. A high return on ad spend tells you that people who saw the ad bought the product. It doesn't tell you they bought because of the ad. In a channel that deliberately targets people who are already shopping for the category, that distinction is the whole game.

Ask for holdout groups. The way to measure lift is to withhold the advertising from a comparable group of shoppers and compare. Some retailers support this properly; many don't. Whether a network can run a clean holdout is a fair question to ask before you commit budget, and the answer tells you something about the network.

Treat seller-reported ROAS as a claim, not a result. It comes from the party selling you the media, calculated with their own attribution window. Use it for direction. Don't report it upward as fact without your own read on lift.

Measure the halo, not the channel. Retail media advertising at one retailer moves sales at other retailers and in physical stores. Judge each network on its own numbers and you'll systematically undervalue the whole channel. The measurement that matters is cumulative sales impact across retailers, online and off. No network will report that for you, so it comes from matched-market tests, media mix modeling or surveying shoppers who saw the advertising and tracking what they bought in store.

That last point isn't theoretical. When Coop runs weekly campaigns across 900 stores and three brands, the KPI is in-store footfall, not clicks on the ad that drove it. The result shows up somewhere other than where the money was spent, which is exactly why single-channel measurement misses it.

The part brands underestimate

Everything above is a media problem. The thing that actually breaks is the creative.

One promotion, six networks, three placement types each, several markets, plus in-store formats at different dimensions. That's hundreds of individual assets for a single campaign. Every network has its own specs, its own CTA rules and its own approval clock. The media plan takes an afternoon. The assets take three weeks, and the approval queues take longer than anyone puts on the calendar.

Boozt produced 27,766 creatives in 2025, roughly 90% of them built by a single campaign designer. Coop has run more than 31,000 creatives across 6,600 creative sets. Neither number is achievable by making files one at a time.

The way through is to build one approved master per promotion and generate the variants from it: ad versioning for the per-network specs, localization for the markets. Sign off the master, not the three hundred files. And treat in-store and DOOH as their own creative brief rather than a resize. A silent screen three meters away, watched for two seconds by someone holding a basket, is not a banner in a different shape.

Frequently asked questions

What is retail media in simple terms?

Retail media is advertising you buy from a retailer to reach that retailer's shoppers. It runs on their website, their app and increasingly on screens inside their stores, and it's targeted using data the retailer collects directly: what people bought, what they searched for, what they put back. The appeal is timing. You're reaching someone who is already shopping the category, and the retailer can see whether they bought afterward, which makes the reporting more direct than most other channels.

What is the difference between retail media and a retail media network?

Retail media is the advertising itself. A retail media network, often shortened to RMN, is the business a specific retailer runs to sell it: the ad formats on offer, the shopper data used for targeting, the buying interface and the reporting. Amazon Advertising, Walmart Connect, Tesco Media & Insight Platform and Carrefour Links are all retail media networks. Buying retail media means buying from one or more of them, and each sets its own specs, rules and reporting definitions.

How many retail media networks does a brand typically use?

Advertisers work across an average of six retail media networks today and expect to be running eleven by the end of 2026, according to research from Skai and Stratably covering 166 retail media advertisers. More than 150 networks exist globally. The number matters operationally rather than commercially: nothing standardizes across networks, so each one you add brings its own ad specs, CTA rules, claim standards, approval queue and reporting definitions. Going from six to eleven is a different problem, not the same one at higher volume.

What is the difference between onsite, offsite and in-store retail media?

Onsite retail media runs on the retailer's own website or app: sponsored products in search results, banners on category pages, product carousels. Offsite runs elsewhere on the internet, on social, display or connected TV, but uses the retailer's shopper data to decide who sees it. In-store runs on physical screens in the store, including entrance displays, shelf-edge screens, smart carts and self-checkout. All three draw on the same first-party data. What changes is the placement and the creative, since an in-store screen is a different brief from a banner.

How much does retail media advertising cost?

There's no single rate, because pricing follows the format. Sponsored product listings are sold at auction on a cost-per-click basis, so you bid for a keyword or category placement and pay when someone clicks. Onsite display, video and offsite placements usually price on a cost per thousand impressions, either at auction or reserved against a spend commitment. Homepage takeovers, category sponsorships and most in-store screen inventory are sold as a fixed fee for a fixed period, and these carry the highest minimums. Larger networks offer self-serve access for the auction formats; smaller ones are often managed-only, with an insertion order and a longer lead time.

How do you measure retail media properly?

Measure incremental lift rather than return on ad spend. ROAS tells you that people who saw the ad bought the product, but it can't separate the sales your advertising caused from the ones that would have happened anyway, which matters in a channel that deliberately targets people already shopping the category. The method is a holdout group: withhold the advertising from a comparable set of shoppers and compare. Ask a network whether it supports clean holdouts before you commit budget. And measure across retailers and channels, because retail media at one retailer moves sales at others and in physical stores.

What is the hardest part of running retail media?

Creative production, not media buying. One promotion running across six networks, several placement types and multiple markets becomes hundreds of individual assets, each built to a different network's specs and CTA rules, and each waiting in that network's approval queue. The media plan can be assembled in an afternoon. The assets take weeks. Most teams handle it by building one approved master per promotion and generating the per-network versions from it, rather than making files one at a time.