It has become one of the most effective ways for brands to connect with high-intent buyers. By being close to the point of purchase and offering closed-loop measurement, it provides a more direct path to sales and return on investment than many upper-funnel channels.
What drives the growth of retail media?
Retail media represents a significant and growing share of digital investment, and U.S. retail media ad spending is expected to reach this range $107.6 billion by 2026, approximately 30 percent of all digital ad spend in the US.
These budget shifts do not happen on their own. They reflect broader changes brands are experiencing across commerce, media and measurement.
- Trade is increasingly guided by the market and by third parties. Brands are turning to third-party models for greater control, margin flexibility and operational leverage, especially as they manage international expansion and market complexity. This expands the inventory, data and closed-loop signals that retailers can generate.
- Budgets move towards measurable performance. In uncertain circumstances, brands are withdrawing from channels with weaker accountability and reinvesting in the channels closest to the purchase. Retail media benefits because it provides a clearer view of results.
- Retailers now have the ‘new cookie’. With verified shopper data and transaction-level insight, retailers can provide targeting and measurement capabilities that have been lost in much of the open internet.
- Retail media are no longer limited to on-location placements. Offsite activation, including cconnected television (CTV) enables retailers to convert their audiences into scalable, full-funnel media products and attract incremental media investments beyond on-premise placements.
As retail media matures, the next shift is already underway. Partnerships are becoming a natural extension of retail media, allowing brands to drive increasing demand and capture it within retailer ecosystems.
Why retail media is the next frontier for partnerships
Despite their size, retail media have historically had only limited overlap connected and partnership programs. This was not due to a lack of relevance, but to practical limitations in infrastructure, financing models and measurement. Routing vendor or retail media budgets through partnerships required manual processes, rigid pricing models and complex coordination. This is changing.
The affiliate and partnership infrastructure has matured to support retail media use cases at scale, breaking down the barriers that historically kept these channels separate.
Key changes include:
- Vendor-funded campaigns can coexist with permanent affiliate programs. Modern tracking and attribution allows campaign-based retail media budgets to run alongside core affiliate and influencer programs without disrupting the affiliate economy.
- Flexible pricing and measurement models enable scale. Cost-per-click (CPC), hybrid, and campaign-based constructs align more closely with retailers’ pricing structures while maintaining performance accountability.
- Standardized reporting enables consistency across multiple channels. Partners can now share impression, click and conversion data in formats that clearly align with internal retail media and commercial reporting, reducing friction between retail media and partnership teams.
What previously required manual solutions can now be executed consistently, allowing partnerships to play a scalable role within retail media strategies.
Why silo purchasing fails
Internally, these shifts are putting pressure on the way brands plan, finance and measure media.
Fragmentation across media, content, market activities and measurement leads to duplication of effort, inconsistent reporting and slower optimization. Retail media also hits multiple profit and loss accounts at the same time. It functions as a trade lever, a media investment and an engine for trade growth, and siled ownership often leads to budgetary competition rather than incrementality planning.
At the same time, management teams are increasingly asking which investments will increase revenue rather than redistribute existing demand. Answering this requires cross-channel measurements, not isolated dashboards.
Internal language and purchasing are shifting towards a uniform commercial media vision. In this model, the partnership channel is increasingly evaluated as a connecting layer between upper-funnel creators, retail media, and lower-funnel conversion incentives.
From parallel channels to one growth engine
This is the point where retail media and partnerships stop working in parallel and start working as a system.
The opportunity is not simply to add partnerships to retail media plans, but to integrate the two into a unified growth model.
Key opportunities include:
- Extend retail media beyond the retailer. Use affiliates, creators and commercial content to drive increasing demand that retail media then captures on the platform, closing the loop on retailer measurement.
- Align on shared incrementality objectives. Unite retail media networks and partners around metrics like new brand acquisition, basket lift, and halo impact, rather than competing attribution claims.
- Use makers as a front door. Deliver top-of-funnel attributable demand to retail media ecosystems through performance-based creator programs.
- Turn campaigns into always optimizing engines. Combine campaign-based retail media with always-on partnership discovery and conversion platforms to smooth out the peaks and valleys of campaign flights.
Even a modest reallocation of retail media budgets into partnerships, just 5 to 10 percent of a roughly $110 billion market, represents a meaningful new pool of investment. The opportunity now is not simply to shift spend, but to redesign how retail media and partnerships work together to drive incremental, measurable growth across the funnel.
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