Retail Media in 2026: Predictions from Skai Experts

After years of explosive growth driven by new network launches and increased budgets, retail media advertising will be defined by something different in 2026: connection over expansion, orchestration over proliferation, and transformation over optimization.

The fundamentals are staggering. The global retail media market is projected to reach nearly $180 billion in 2025, with growth showing no signs of slowing. But as the space matures, its challenges have shifted. Brands are managing campaigns across dozens of retail media networks, each with different capabilities and measurement standards. AI is moving from experimental to essential. And the boundaries between retail, social, search, and streaming continue to dissolve.

The question isn’t whether retail media will keep growing; it’s whether your organization can keep up with the complexity that growth creates. 

Below, five industry experts from Skai share their perspectives on what will define retail media in 2026, from the practical realities of incrementality measurement to the strategic implications of off-site expansion and AI transformation.

Predictions by Nich Weinheimer, Chief Strategy Officer at Skai

Enter programmatic commerce media. 2026 will be the year that retail media finally starts acting like a true part of programmatic advertising instead of the bespoke cottage industry built around Amazon and Walmart. Brands will move beyond retailer-by-retailer tactics and into a world where real-time signals such as availability, price, promotion, competitive pressure, and even market share will drive automated buying decisions across the entire RMN landscape. 

Classic RTB plumbing will creep into the mix, with DSP/SSP pathways that look suspiciously familiar to the OG programmatic era. And yes, Google, the original plumber, will quietly (or not so quietly) expand retailer dotcom monetization by exposing retail demand through their traditional click-out SSP frameworks. With Google/Criteo partnerships already budding and Microsoft’s Retail Ad Network scaling, retailers will finally admit they are no longer being handed blank checks at 0% interest to build RMNs. Making their inventory easier to buy, measure, and service won’t just be nice will usher in the adoption of networked technology and scale.

Holding companies flex their scale. On the heels of the IPG/Omnicom merger, Publicis’ amazing tech and talent, and rumors of other consolidations in the industry, 2026 will see the holding companies remind everyone why they remain the gravitational force in marketing. While headlines may continue to pit AI against the HoldCos’ assets and GTM machines, the real story will be the resilience of the client–partner/AOR relationship, and the innovative full-stack tech, strategy, services, and consulting that these behemoths can deliver. 

Expect more RFPs won and lost on the strength of their tech ecosystems, more tuck-in acquisitions of innovative new technologies to leverage in future RFPs, and the emergence of the first Operating Companies focused solely on developing custom agents for their clients. The pure FTE model may be fading, but don’t sleep on the scale, integration power, and determination of these titans as they retool for a new era.

Don’t sleep on Amazon & Walmart. With more than 75% of the market between them, Amazon and Walmart have shaped the retail media ecosystem for the past decade. In 2026, Amazon will continue its dominance in core retail media while solidifying itself as a real player in TV, live sports, and open-internet media, tech, and data. But the real story to watch will be Walmart. As it unlocks the full force of its grocery share, omnichannel scale, and operational footprint, Walmart will start chipping away at Amazon’s dominance in retail media. 

Once Walmart matches the paradigm that Amazon offers today, ads, retail sales, a clean-room solution, and unifies Scintilla (its data analytics platform), Walmart Connect, its DSP, and its in-store and pickup touchpoints into a single marketing cloud, it will have the ability to command upper-funnel ad spend by powering innovative omnichannel and in-store campaigns. This will give brands the insights they need to include true offline sales as a denominator when calculating their Walmart Connect budgets. With a new CEO in place, now’s the time to align internally to build the field of dreams that marketers are pining for. If you build it, the retail media dollars will come.

Predictions by Jeff Cohen, Chief Business Development Officer at Skai

The story of 2026 will be written by those who can connect channels, not by those who can optimize them in isolation. We’re moving from walled gardens to what’s called “hedged gardens,” where retail media networks recognize that they need to extend beyond their own walls to achieve meaningful scale.

Off-site retail media reaches an inflection point. Instacart partnering with Google, Walmart acquiring Vizio, Amazon’s Authenticated Graph connecting advertisers to 90% of US households. These partnerships signal that closed ecosystems have natural limits. The competitive advantage comes from connecting first-party data across search, social, video, and retail to reveal what your customers actually look like, rather than what you thought they looked like.

Fragmentation demands orchestration. 85% of CPG brands now spend across four or more retail media networks, each with its own taxonomy and measurement standards. The next wave of growth won’t come from launching more networks alone. It will come from better orchestration through innovative technology, cleaner data, and unified planning.

AI transformation requires two strategies. One for implementing AI tools. One for competing in an AI world where consumer behavior is changing. Amazon’s Creative Agent, Meta’s Advantage+, and Google’s AI advisory systems are powerful but native to their own walled gardens. The human-AI partnership is where value lives: AI handles execution at scale while humans focus on strategy and creative ideation.

The brands that win will embrace ecosystem thinking over channel optimization, practical AI implementation over hype, and partnerships that reduce friction. They’ll break down data silos, connect teams around shared metrics, and move fast while measuring what matters. The opportunity is massive. The path forward is clear: orchestrate, connect, and transform.

Predictions by Michelle Urwin, Chief Marketing Officer at Skai

Looking ahead to 2026, I actually think retail media will be shaped less by new buzzwords and more by how brands adapt to what’s already in motion.

Agentic AI is going to fundamentally change consumer behavior, and as marketers, we need to be ready. Expect a sharper focus on data and content, because how brands show up in AI-driven environments will matter more than ever. It’s also going to change how we work. The AI agents that today just follow instructions will soon become more personalized, more autonomous, and more integrated into our everyday workflows. It’s a little scary to think that what we’re experiencing now is the worst AI will ever be, and it’s already come so far in just 12 months. What’s ahead feels genuinely exciting.

Incrementality isn’t new, but it’s becoming the key proof point for marketers under pressure to show real growth. With budgets tightening, it’s no longer enough to chase clicks or impressions. Marketers need to understand what’s actually driving new demand. The challenge is consistency; everyone measures it differently. Getting to a shared definition of incrementality will separate those who can prove impact from those who can only report performance, and I would be surprised if the industry did not make significant progress next year.

Last but not least, we all know from our own buying behavior that the path to purchase isn’t linear anymore. Retail, search, and brand are blending, and it’s forcing teams to work in completely new ways. Connecting data and measurement across the full journey isn’t a nice-to-have anymore; it’s how brands will understand what drives results. It’s also pushing organizations to rethink their structures and invest in technology that can actually connect across channels.

Predictions by Kevin Weiss, VP of Commerce Media at Skai

Incrementality ubiquity. At this point, incrementality is ubiquitous in the retail media world. Everyone knows it’s a top priority. Many already expect that stakeholders working for their organizations are actively trying to drive more of it and measure it better. Over the past few years, the retail media ecosystem has adopted a bit of false hope: that incrementality could be achieved entirely through data-driven means. Most folks are coming out of that trough of disillusionment and going through phases 3 and 4 of the Gartner Hype Cycle, appreciating the art and the science of it, scrutinizing attribution error, and plodding forward in the face of uncertainty. 2026 will be characterized as the year when it became common for brands to reach the plateau of productivity with incrementality.

Amazon Ads dominance. Amazon has too many competitive moats for Amazon Ads to cede market share to other RMNs in 2026. That doesn’t mean they’ll have an easy time growing ad spend year over year for each existing advertiser – brands are scrutinizing the impact of every dollar invested below the line more now than ever. Instead, it means that the bar is higher than ever for other RMNs. And the SSPs looking to address the fragmentation challenges now have to contend with Amazon’s Retail Ad Service. But, as with everything else, in a saturated ecosystem, you get innovation followed by coalescence. We’ll see pockets of non-traditional marketing investment that outpace retail media, particularly those that offer pay-for-performance or create knock-on effects, such as driving high-purchase-intent shoppers to Amazon (or Rufus). 

Agentic normalization. AI mode is here to stay. Users will increasingly expect more from their interactions with retailers and with media. Shoppable, paid results will permeate these experiences in 2026. Some directly in the chat interface or conversation with agents. Some as AI-suggested offers alongside the interactions. While the demand outpaces the supply, the market will be hyper-focused on each development that could spell the future of this new battleground and any insight that can translate to competitive advantage.

Predictions by Jason Wolfson, VP Product Marketing and Enablement at Skai

In 2026, retail media won’t just be a conversion play; it’s a full-funnel, programmatic-grade ecosystem that now demands alignment across an entire organization. Decisions are no longer made solely by media teams. Marketing wants brand lift and audience reach. Ecommerce wants share growth and retail readiness. Sales wants retailer-specific momentum and joint business-planning wins. Finance wants predictable ROI. Each stakeholder is influencing retail media strategy, and each requires a different flavor of proof.

That’s why data is becoming the new center of gravity. Retailers’ first-party shopping signals, walled-garden performance data, identity solutions, and commerce and marketplace insights are converging into a single decision layer. Organizations need data that can satisfy every team simultaneously: brand-safe reach for marketing, incrementality for media, basket-level insights for ecommerce, retailer scorecard impact for sales, and financial efficiency for leadership. And with non-Amazon retailers offering differentiated audiences, new formats, and richer first-party data, the retail mix is finally expanding beyond a single default channel.

This multi-threaded pressure is pushing retail media to replicate the sophistication of programmatic: omnichannel orchestration, consistent measurement, unified planning, and agnostic attribution that moves seamlessly from brand to demand to conversion. For those of us driving revenue, this is the moment to operationalize retail media as a cross-functional discipline, not just a media tactic. Brands that embrace holistic data, connect teams around shared metrics, and diversify across both Amazon and non-Amazon networks will be the ones rewriting the playbook and pulling ahead.

Conclusion: Are you ready for retail media’s big 2026 push?

The predictions from our Skai experts point to a common thread: retail media in 2026 will reward sophistication over scale, coordination over coverage, and proof over promises. Whether it’s the call for consistent incrementality measurement, the push for cross-functional alignment, the focus on reaching the productivity plateau, or the imperative to orchestrate fragmented networks, success will come from connecting the pieces rather than adding more of them.

The transformation is well underway. Brands that can navigate the complexity with cleaner data, more innovative technology, and unified strategies will not just participate in retail media’s growth but define its next chapter.

The insights in this article reflect the expertise built directly into Skai’s retail media solutions. We help brands orchestrate campaigns across dozens of retail media networks, connect data across the full customer journey, and measure what actually drives incremental growth. From AI-powered optimization to unified cross-channel planning, our solutions turn the complexity of modern retail media into a competitive advantage. 

Want to see how our innovation and expert team can help you navigate 2026 and beyond? Schedule a brief demo at your convenience to meet us and see our AI-driven digital advertising platform.

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