A retail media platform is technology that lets brands plan, activate, and measure advertising across retailers’ digital properties (sponsored products, display, search, and connected TV) using each retailer’s first-party shopper data. By connecting ad exposure directly to purchase outcomes, retail media platforms give brands access to high-intent shoppers at the moment of purchase decision and the closed-loop measurement that traditional digital advertising can’t provide. US retail media ad spending is projected to reach $69.33 billion in 2026, making it one of the fastest-growing channels in all of digital advertising.
Retail media has gone from emerging channel to top-three ad medium in less than a decade. The growth comes down to a simple equation: retailers have first-party shopper data, brands need first-party shopper data, and the advertising inventory that connects them lives where actual purchases happen.
The channel’s biggest strength is its diversity, which is also its biggest operational headache. Amazon Ads, Walmart Connect, Target Roundel, Instacart Ads, Kroger Precision Marketing, and dozens of other networks each have their own interfaces, ad formats, bidding rules, and reporting structures. Managing campaigns across more than a handful of them quickly becomes a full-time job no one signed up for.
A retail media platform solves the fragmentation problem. It connects to multiple retail media networks (RMNs) through one interface, so your team can plan, run, and measure across them as one program. This guide walks through what retail media platforms are, why they matter in 2026, and how the leading brands use them to grow.
What is a retail media platform?
A retail media platform is software that lets brands manage advertising campaigns across multiple retail media networks from one interface. It sits between your team and the dozens of individual retailer ad systems (Amazon, Walmart, Instacart, Target, Kroger, and the rest), connecting through APIs to centralize planning, activation, and measurement.
The terminology can be confusing. A retail media network is the advertising platform owned and operated by an individual retailer (Walmart Connect is Walmart’s RMN). A retail media platform is the third-party technology that lets you advertise across many RMNs at once. Both deliver retail media advertising. The platform is what makes operating across networks practical at scale.
What a retail media platform typically does:
- Connects to multiple retailer APIs through one login
- Centralizes campaign management across networks
- Normalizes metrics for cross-retailer reporting
- Automates bidding, budget pacing, and keyword harvesting
- Brings in commerce data (digital shelf, share of voice) alongside media data
- Provides cross-retailer measurement and attribution
For brands running ads on more than two or three retailers, the platform is what stands between a manageable program and a perpetual reconciliation exercise.
Why retail media platforms are growing in 2026
Retail media is one of the fastest-growing channels in advertising, and the platforms that orchestrate it are growing right alongside it. The reasons behind the growth are structural.
US retail media ad spending will grow 17.8% year-over-year in 2026, outpacing both social and search growth rates, according to EMARKETER’s December 2025 forecast. Total US spend will reach $69.33 billion in 2026, up from $58.79 billion in 2025. Globally, retail media is forecast to surpass $163 billion by 2027.
Three forces are behind the growth.
1. First-party data is now the most valuable currency in advertising.
As third-party cookies have continued to fade and signal loss has reshaped digital targeting, retailers’ first-party purchase data has become the most reliable basis for personalization at scale. Retailers know what people actually buy, beyond what they searched or clicked.
2. Closed-loop measurement is finally standard.
Retail media networks connect ad impressions directly to transactions inside their stores. That deterministic attribution (“this ad produced this sale”) is the kind of proof traditional digital advertising can’t deliver. According to August 2025 Infillion data cited by EMARKETER, 40% of advertisers now regard retail media as capable of delivering full-funnel results.
3. The expansion is going off-site.
Off-site retail media (where retailer data activates ads on CTV, social, and the open web) is growing roughly twice as fast as on-site retail media. That extends the channel’s reach far beyond retailer-owned properties and turns retail media into a true full-funnel medium.
The growth comes with consolidation. Amazon and Walmart will capture roughly 89% of incremental US retail media spending in 2026, according to EMARKETER. Brands that want to run efficiently across the long tail of retailers, while also investing on the major ones, need a platform layer to do it.
What are the top retail media platforms?
Each major retail media network brings different strengths in audience, ad formats, and data. Here’s how the top five compare.
Amazon Ads
Amazon Ads is the largest retail media network by a wide margin, capturing the dominant share of all retail media advertising. Beyond its core ecommerce site, it offers ad inventory across owned properties including Twitch, IMDb, Fire TV, and Prime Video. Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display, and Amazon DSP make up the core ad suite, and Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) gives brands access to richer audience and measurement analysis. The volume of intent signals on Amazon (search queries, browsing behavior, purchase history) makes it the highest-converting RMN for most product categories.
Walmart Connect
Walmart Connect is the second-largest retail media network and the clearest omnichannel proof point in the space. Walmart’s ad business blends online, in-store, and off-site placements powered by shopper data from approximately 90% of US households. The 2026 partnership with Vizio extends Walmart’s reach into CTV inventory, and Walmart’s collaboration with The Trade Desk has created a retail-data-powered DSP. For brands selling in physical stores, Walmart’s ability to attribute online ad exposure to in-store purchases is a meaningful differentiator.
Target Roundel
Target Roundel taps into Target’s first-party guest data across the website, mobile app, and stores, with a customer base that skews more affluent and brand-loyal than the typical mass retailer. Roundel has invested heavily in off-site partnerships (including Pinterest and Roku), letting brands activate Target’s audience data well beyond Target.com. The Roundel Media Studio launch made the network accessible to small and mid-sized advertisers, broadening the brand mix beyond enterprise CPG.
Instacart Ads
Instacart Ads reaches shoppers actively in the basket-building moment on the largest grocery delivery marketplace in North America. The network spans more than 1,500 retail brands and tens of thousands of stores, with Sponsored Product, Display, and Brand Pages as the core ad formats. Instacart has also extended its technology to retailers through Carrot Ads, letting grocers run their own retail media programs on Instacart’s infrastructure, and brought advertising into physical stores through Caper Carts, AI-powered smart carts that surface promotions while shoppers move through the aisles.
Kroger Precision Marketing
Kroger Precision Marketing (KPM) is one of the most advanced retail media networks in grocery, built on loyalty card data from approximately 60 million households. The network’s strength is precision: KPM’s first-party purchase data powers both on-site advertising and off-site activations through partnerships with Roku, Pinterest, Meta, and other publishers. For consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands selling through grocery, KPM offers measurable lift attributable to actual basket-level purchase behavior.
Benefits of retail media platforms
Retail media platforms deliver value in seven specific areas. The combination is what’s behind the channel’s growth.
Precise targeting
Retailers’ first-party data is the most accurate targeting signal in digital advertising. Instead of inferring intent from a click or a third-party segment, you’re targeting based on actual purchase history, search behavior, and browse patterns inside the retailer’s environment. That precision produces stronger conversion rates than channels that rely on inferred audiences.
High-intent audiences
A shopper on Amazon, Walmart, or Instacart is in shopping mode, with purchase intent already activated. Reaching that shopper at the moment of decision compresses the time between awareness and conversion. Retail media is reportedly 50% more effective than social media at moving consumers to take action after seeing a message, according to WARC research.
Closed-loop measurement
Retail media is one of the few digital channels where you can connect ad exposure directly to purchase. The retailer sees both the impression and the transaction inside the same system, producing deterministic attribution. That’s what makes return on ad spend (ROAS) calculations on retail media networks more reliable than on most other channels.
Improved customer experience
Sponsored products, display ads, and recommended items inside a retailer’s environment show up in the moment a shopper is already searching for something to buy. The relevance is high, the disruption is low, and the format integrates naturally into the shopping experience as a helpful suggestion.
New revenue stream for retailers
Retail media has reshaped retailer economics. Profit margins on retail media advertising commonly run in the 50% to 70% range, well above traditional retail margins, and the revenue scales without the capital expense of new stores or new SKUs. That’s why every major retailer is racing to build or expand a retail media network.
Brand safety
Retail media inventory sits inside trusted, high-context environments. Ads appear on the retailer’s product pages, search results, and category pages, well-removed from user-generated content of unknown quality. For brands cautious about adjacency risk, retail media offers some of the cleanest inventory in digital advertising.
Increased visibility
Retail media gives brands premium real estate at the digital shelf: sponsored placements at the top of search results, display banners on category pages, and visibility in product recommendations. Products with strong retail media presence consistently outperform products with comparable organic-only visibility, which is why brands compete heavily for prime placements.
Challenges retail media platforms face
The retail media opportunity is real, but the channel comes with friction. Five challenges shape the operational reality of running retail media at scale.
Data privacy and regulation
Retail media’s reliance on first-party data is also its most visible regulatory exposure. State-level privacy laws in the US, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe, and ongoing scrutiny of data-sharing practices all affect how retailers can package and activate shopper data. Brands need partners (both retailers and platform providers) who treat compliance as foundational, with audit trails and consent management built in from the start.
Rising cost and competition
As retail media has matured, cost per click (CPC) and cost per thousand impressions (CPM) have climbed. Amazon, Walmart, and a growing number of mid-tier retailers run well-attended auctions where the easy efficiency wins of the early days are gone. Winning at scale now requires sharper bidding, stronger creative, and tighter optimization.
Limited inventory and scale
Each retail media network only reaches the shoppers who use that retailer. Even Amazon doesn’t reach every consumer for every category. Brands that need broad reach can’t rely on a single RMN, and brands that try to be present on every RMN quickly hit the operational ceiling that retail media platforms exist to break through.
Lack of standardized measurement
Every retailer measures impressions, clicks, conversions, and ROAS slightly differently. Comparing performance across networks is rarely apples-to-apples. EMARKETER’s November 2025 forecast warned advertisers not to expect measurement standardization any time soon. Cross-retailer normalization is one of the most important things a platform layer adds.
Attribution issues
Closed-loop measurement is powerful inside any single retailer’s environment, but attributing across retailers becomes much harder when a shopper sees an ad on one network and buys on another. Off-site retail media compounds the challenge. Brands that take measurement seriously combine retailer-reported performance with their own incrementality testing and media mix modeling for the full picture.
Keys to a successful retail media strategy
Successful retail media programs follow the same five-step pattern, regardless of category or scale.
1. Build a strong first-party data foundation
Your own customer data is the input to everything that follows. Capture it cleanly across your owned properties, store it in a way that’s queryable, and respect the privacy commitments you’ve made to customers. Without a strong first-party data foundation, your retail media program runs on someone else’s signals.
2. Unify and organize data into a single customer view
Retail media data lives in multiple places: each retailer’s reporting interface, your media-buying platform, your commerce systems, and your customer relationship management (CRM) tools. Bringing it together into a unified customer view is what makes cross-retailer optimization possible. This is where most retail media programs stall, and it’s where a retail media platform earns its value.
3. Segment audiences and define targeting strategy
Once your data is unified, build segments tied to business objectives (new-to-brand acquisition, lapsed-customer reactivation, premium-tier upsell) and apply them across networks. Resist the temptation to replicate the same audience strategy on every retailer. Each RMN has different audience strengths, and your strategy should reflect them.
4. Activate campaigns across high-intent retail media placements
Match the placement to the moment. Sponsored Products work at the bottom of the funnel, when intent is highest. Display and CTV work earlier in the journey, building consideration. Off-site retail media extends both reach and frequency. The right mix depends on your category, your goals, and the buying journey for your customer.
5. Measure performance and optimize continuously
Retail media performance shifts week to week. Search query trends, competitor activity, and seasonal demand all move the targets. Build review cadences that match the speed of the channel (daily for hot campaigns, weekly for steady-state), and treat optimization as a continuous practice that runs alongside your campaigns.
Get started with a retail media platform
Retail media is a top-three advertising channel that connects first-party data, high-intent audiences, and closed-loop measurement in a way no other channel can match. The brands growing fastest in 2026 run retail media as a coordinated, cross-network program that operates with shared data and consistent measurement across every retailer.
Skai’s retail media platform connects you to 100+ retail media networks and commerce media platforms from one login. Powered by Celeste AI and built for the full-funnel realities of modern retail, the platform brings unified data, automated optimization, and cross-retailer measurement together so your team can scale faster and spend smarter. Get a demo to see what’s possible when your retail media program runs on one platform.
Retail media platform FAQs
Retail media platform pricing typically falls into one of two models: a flat annual subscription tied to program scale, or a percentage of the media spend running through the platform. Flat-fee pricing keeps technology costs predictable as your media budget grows. Percentage-of-spend pricing scales with you but can penalize successful campaigns with rising fees. For most enterprise advertisers, flat annual fees are more economical at scale. Costs vary based on the number of retailers connected, the breadth of features, and the level of managed services included.
No. While the largest CPG brands have spent the most on retail media historically, the rise of self-service tools (including Amazon Ads, Walmart Connect, and Roundel Media Studio) has made retail media accessible to small and mid-sized advertisers. The right platform depends on your scale: smaller brands often start with a retailer’s native tools and graduate to a third-party platform once they’re running ads on three or more retailers and the operational overhead of managing each one separately becomes the bottleneck.
Several major retail media networks (Walmart Connect, Target Roundel, and Kroger Precision Marketing) connect online ad exposure to in-store purchases through loyalty programs and shopper data, even though only a small portion of retail media advertising itself is in-store. That measurement capability matters because roughly 80% of consumer spending still happens in physical stores, according to EMARKETER. The ability to attribute online ad spend to offline sales is one of retail media’s most distinctive and valuable capabilities.
The most common retail media ad formats include sponsored product listings (the dominant format on most networks), sponsored brand ads (banners featuring multiple products), sponsored display ads (across the retailer’s site and off-site), search ads on retailer search pages, video ads on product pages and connected TV, and in-store digital placements on screens, smart carts, and audio systems. Off-site retail media activates retailer audiences across CTV, social, and the open web, extending reach beyond retailer-owned properties.
Start with the retailers you actually need to reach. The biggest differences between platforms are which RMNs they integrate with, how thorough those integrations are, and how cleanly the platform normalizes data across them. From there, evaluate four things: the breadth of automation (especially around bidding and keyword harvesting), the quality of cross-retailer measurement, the volume of commerce data alongside media data, and the integration story with your existing stack. Get references from brands at your scale, and validate the platform’s ability to handle the specific retailer mix you need.
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