As retail media enters its second act, savvy brands diversify networks and tactics
Justin Jefferson, vp of strategy and insights, Keen Decision Systems
The honeymoon phase of retail media is over. After years of explosive, low-hanging-fruit growth, the channel has reached a high-stakes maturity. With retail media now commanding 22% of total media budgets, the pressure to deliver more than a decent ROAS has reached a breaking point. In 2026, the brands that win will do more than buy shelf space; they’ll be orchestrating entire customer journeys.
What was initially driven by strong performance and clear ROI advantages relative to non-retail media tactics has now reached a point where the next wave of growth will come in different forms. Now, growth will be driven less by continued share gains and more by how effectively brands deploy retail media across tactics, retailers and throughout the funnel.
As a result of this shift, marketers will have to reevaluate how they approach retail media and find a way to maintain their ROI on the channel as its growth levels out. We’ll explore some of those tactics below.
The end of the search-only era
Retail media’s growth has historically been fueled by heavy investment in bottom-funnel formats, where retailer-reported ROAS often appears strongest. However, retail media has become a more comprehensive marketing vehicle — expanding beyond pure capture tactics and accommodating both top- and bottom-funnel tactics.
While the broader market likely still skews more heavily toward lower-funnel search, its expansion into the top of the funnel suggests that this could continue in 2026. As such, the industry will need to evolve beyond ROI and ROAS for measurement, particularly as incremental returns diminish over time.
The rise of the specialist RMN
With this expansion comes an embrace of more retail media networks. While Amazon remains the dominant retailer, especially for smaller brands with limited budgets, marketers are starting to diversify their spending. Amazon’s share declined from 56% in 2024 to 46% in 2025, with retailers moving investments to Walmart and mid-sized retailers. In fact, mid-sized retailers accounted for a quarter of all retail media networks in 2025.
Despite these shifts, incumbents like Amazon and Walmart are broadening their capabilities to deliver ROI growth and maintain their dominance over these upstarts. Within the past year, Amazon and Walmart have expanded beyond on-site search to higher-impact formats like video. For instance, eMarketer found that Walmart Connect continues to grow at a higher rate than the retail media market as a whole, with 33% growth in the U.S. last quarter, accounting for a third of Walmart’s operating income.
These formats have proven to deliver strong ROI, with video performing way above typical tactics like display and search. This comes despite cost declines across many retailers and formats, which typically prompt marketers to shift tactics toward cheaper options.
However, as performance improvements are increasingly shaped by how tactics evolve within channels, taking the cheaper option no longer delivers the same results. As such, the next phase of retail media growth will come less from cost declines or retailer expansion, and more from shifting the mix toward tactics that support full-funnel impact, like streaming video.
Rebalancing retail media budgets
As marketers seek tactics to thrive in the new retail media environment, it’s important that they start by rebalancing their budget beyond the bottom of the funnel.
The hard truth is that the more crowded the bottom of the funnel becomes, the more expensive it gets to stay there. Marketers must stop viewing off-site video and social formats as experimental and start seeing them as the necessary fuel for their conversion engines. If marketers aren’t feeding the top of the funnel, their search tactics will eventually starve.
So, marketers should maintain search as a conversion foundation, while shifting investment upstream into off-site, display, video and social retail media network formats to support full-funnel demand creation and avoid diminishing returns at the point of purchase.
Next, they should concentrate growth within retail media leaders while selectively diversifying their investments. As brands expand beyond Amazon and Walmart, it’s important that they don’t spread their budgets too thin across emerging networks. Amazon and Walmart should continue to account for the largest share of investments, and other networks should be chosen based on the target audiences marketers are looking to reach.
Finally, as retail media continues to mature, brands should focus on tactic evolution. ROI improvements are increasingly tied to higher-impact formats like video, making format selection as critical as retailer choice for capturing returns. As such, brands should prioritize tactics that are more top of funnel, as those have proven to deliver stronger performance.
Retail media will continue to evolve in 2026, so brands will need to adjust their tried-and-true methods to maximize their investments in this channel. Like with other formats, it’s critical to embrace top-of-funnel tactics and rebalance budgets to drive more conversions. Marketers also need to make smart, data-backed decisions when choosing the retailers they invest in. By choosing the right partners and tactics, brands can thrive in a mature retail media landscape.
Sponsored by Keen Decision Systems