There are now 277 retail media networks operating globally. Two hundred and seventy-seven.
Most brands are active on one, maybe two. And here is the uncomfortable truth most retail media network (RMN) operators are starting to sit with: the majority of those 277 networks look almost identical from a brand advertiser's perspective. Same sponsored product listings. Same display banners. Same category page takeovers. Same measurement dashboards, different logo in the top left corner.
The era of simply having a retail media network and expecting budgets to follow is over. What comes next will be decided by a different question entirely: not whether you have an RMN, but whether yours is worth buying.
This post covers what retail media networks actually are, why the channel grew this fast, who is winning, and most importantly, what the best operators are doing to rise above the noise in 2026.
Start Here: What a Retail Media Network Actually Is
Strip away the jargon and the concept is straightforward.
A retail media network is an advertising platform built and operated by a retailer. It lets brands pay to reach the retailer's audience, using the retailer's own customer data, across the retailer's owned channels. That includes the website, the app, email, loyalty program communications, and in some cases, in-store digital signage.
"The concept is straightforward: retailers have audiences, transaction data, and physical or digital touchpoints. An RMN packages those assets into advertising products that brands can buy."
— PassBy, Retail Media Networks: The Complete Guide for Retail & CPG (2026)
What separates retail media from traditional digital advertising is proximity. When a shopper is on a grocery retailer's app building a weekly cart, they are not browsing abstractly. They are actively looking to buy. An ad that reaches them in that moment is not competing for attention against unrelated content. It is showing up at exactly the right time.
According to eMarketer, what separates RMNs from traditional digital advertising is their access to first-party purchase data. Brands can target based on actual purchase behavior rather than inferred interests. When a retailer knows a customer buys certain products regularly and that customer is actively shopping, relevant brand advertising is not a distraction. It is useful.
That relevance advantage is what made retail media worth paying for. And the market responded accordingly.
Why Retail Media Grew This Fast
Three things converged to make retail media one of the fastest-growing ad channels in digital history.
First-party data became scarce everywhere else
As third-party cookies faded as a reliable targeting mechanism across the open web, advertisers started placing enormous value on data that was both deterministic and consented. Retailer purchase data is exactly that. Survey data shows that 58% of US ad buyers prioritize first-party data partnerships, reflecting the strategic importance of retail media relationships. Retail media did not create that demand. It inherited it.
Closed-loop attribution solved an old problem
For decades, the standard critique of brand advertising was that you could not prove it worked. Retail media broke that. Because the same retailer owns both the ad placement and the purchase transaction, they can connect impression to sale directly. This matters enormously for CPG brands that have spent years arguing about whether their marketing actually moved product off shelves. Now there is an answer.
The economics are exceptional
Retail margins on physical products are thin, often in the low single digits for grocery. Retail media margins are nothing like that. Profit margins are commonly in the 50 to 70 percent range for mature platforms, well above core merchandising. Advertising revenue does not cannibalize product revenue. It is an entirely new, high-margin line sitting on top of existing traffic.
Amazon figured this out before almost everyone. Amazon generated $68.6 billion in advertising revenue in 2025. Walmart Connect brought in $6.4 billion the same year, up 46% year over year. Those numbers explained the land rush. Every retailer with meaningful traffic suddenly had a case for building a media business.
The Market Today: Big Numbers, Bigger Concentration
Retail media has grown into a $203.9 billion global market in 2026. That is an extraordinary number. According to Forrester, global retail media spending will reach $312 billion by 2030, more than twice the level of global television ad spending.
But underneath those headline figures, the market is highly concentrated. For mid-sized retailers, the strategic implication is significant.
Amazon and Walmart will capture 89% of incremental retail media spending in 2026, leaving a small slice for all other RMNs. The market share of every other RMN tracked by eMarketer will either stay flat or decline through 2027.
— eMarketer, January 2026
The brands managing the largest budgets are already committed to Amazon. They are not going to shift that spend to a regional grocery network or a specialty retailer with a comparable format offering. They might add incremental budget there, but they will only do so if the value proposition is clearly different.
RMNs have been very focused on keeping up with competitive capabilities, which has led to a lack of distinction that will likely have brands spending with the retailers that can reach and convert the most shoppers. Some RMNs are revisiting their growth strategies, recognizing the need to differentiate.
This is the tension that defines the retail media landscape in 2026. You can have the infrastructure. You can have the data. But if what you are selling looks like what Amazon sells, just with a smaller budget and smaller reach, you are competing on a losing playing field.
What Differentiated RMNs Are Actually Doing Differently
The good news is that differentiation is possible. It just requires a different set of decisions than the ones most RMNs made in their early build-out phase.
Data depth, not just data access
A unified retail media platform that integrates identity, predictive AI, and data clean rooms not only prevents tech fragmentation and data loss, it also enables retailers to activate and measure successful retail media campaigns across on-site, off-site, and in-store channels.
The retailers pulling ahead are not just offering audience targeting. They are offering contextual intelligence at the individual shopper level. Predictive signals, not historical cohorts. Understanding that a shopper who bought running shoes eight weeks ago might be in the market for athletic apparel now. That kind of inference is what separates a smart RMN from a system that sells segments.
Full-funnel thinking, not just performance activation
Early retail media was almost entirely lower funnel. Sponsored product listings reaching people who were already searching. That still works. But it has limits, and brand advertisers are starting to feel them.
What was initially driven by strong performance and clear ROI advantages has now reached a point where the next wave of growth will come in different forms. Growth will be driven less by continued share gains and more by how effectively brands deploy retail media across tactics and throughout the funnel.
The RMNs attracting larger brand investment are the ones that can answer the question: how does a partner brand build awareness, consideration, and conversion inside your ecosystem, not just win the last click? That requires upper-funnel formats, storytelling environments, and ways to measure impact beyond immediate ROAS.
One major shift in 2025 was how quickly retail media moved into premium video and entertainment environments, broadening retail media from being mostly performance-driven to something much more full-funnel and storytelling-focused.
Format differentiation as a competitive moat
This is the lever that the smartest RMN operators are starting to pull, and it may be the most underappreciated one.
The full format spectrum in 2026 now includes sponsored product listings, display ads, video ads with autoplay and embedded analytics, and story ads that are full-screen visual storytelling formats replicating social media experiences within the retailer's app.
Most networks compete on the first two. The ones building real moats are investing in formats that brand advertisers recognize from their highest-performing social channels, and now want inside owned retail environments.
The behavioral logic here is worth understanding. A display banner on a category page is easily ignored. A shopper is there to browse products. An immersive, full-screen format that sits at the top of the app, that shoppers open habitually and navigate through deliberately, commands a different quality of attention. Attention given willingly holds longer. That is a different kind of inventory, and it justifies a different price point.
Some of the newer RMNs launching in 2025 focused first on proof — launching a media network that was measurable from day one in real time. The idea was not to align incentives first. Instead, it was about proof that it works to drive business outcomes.
That approach, measurable performance from the first campaign, is exactly what makes non-commodity formats viable for brand partners. They do not want to take a leap of faith on a new placement. They want engagement data, attribution, and a clear link between the format and the outcome.
Non-endemic inventory as a growth unlock
Non-endemic advertising represents a significant growth opportunity for retail media networks as endemic brand advertising approaches saturation. This strategy allows retailers to monetize their first-party data by selling ad space to brands promoting products or services not sold by that retailer.
A grocery retailer's customer base is also someone's travel-booking audience, insurance prospect, and streaming service subscriber. Non-endemic retail media turns the retailer's audience into something much more versatile than a product sales channel. This is where the "retailer as media owner" framing becomes a real revenue strategy, not just a positioning exercise.
The Differentiator That Is Mostly Untapped
Most of the differentiation conversation in retail media focuses on data and measurement. Those are real advantages and they matter. But there is a third lever that relatively few RMNs have invested in seriously: the quality of the ad experience itself.
Brand advertisers spend enormous amounts on TikTok and Instagram because the formats are engaging. The immersive, full-screen, social-native video and story formats drive attention in a way that a banner next to a product listing simply does not. Brands know this. They brief their agencies around it. And then they often accept a completely different standard when it comes to retail media placements, because that is what is available.
That gap is closing. The retailers building premium inventory in 2026 are not just offering better data. They are offering formats that feel native to how their shoppers already consume content. Not because it is theoretically better, but because the engagement data proves it works.
This is where a platform like Storyly fits into the picture. Storyly's Sponsored Stories product brings social-native, full-screen story formats into the highest-attention real estate inside a retailer's app. Shoppers open their shopping app out of habit, navigate the story bar at the top with intent, and engage with brand content in a format that feels familiar rather than intrusive. It is the format that justifies a premium CPM, because the attention economics actually support one. And it slots into existing retail media stacks as an additional premium layer, without replacing the infrastructure already in place.
What to Take Away
Retail media is not a bubble. The fundamentals are sound: first-party data, closed-loop attribution, high-margin ad revenue on top of existing traffic. Those advantages are real and durable.
But the window for simply having a retail media network is closing. Brand advertisers have more choices than ever, budgets are under pressure, and the RMNs that look like everyone else are going to struggle to grow.
The ones that win will be the ones that invested in the right data infrastructure, built for full-funnel brand partnerships, thought carefully about format, and made it easy for brand partners to prove the investment worked.
Two hundred and seventy-seven networks. A lot of them are going to have very similar conversations with brand advertisers in 2026. The ones that have a different conversation will have a different result.
Want to see what premium retail media inventory looks like?
Storyly helps retailers build premium ad inventory with Sponsored Stories — a social-native ad format that turns the highest-attention real estate in your app into a placement brand partners compete to book.
