Updated June 2026. Original publish date preserved. Rebuilt as the Retail Media Networks hub.
Retail media networks are the fastest-growing major category in U.S. digital advertising. Combined spend across the major retail media platforms now exceeds $60 billion annually and is projected to exceed $100 billion before the end of the decade. The category has restructured the relationship between consumer brands, retailers, and the broader advertising ecosystem — and most of the marketing trade press is still covering it like a niche tactic.
This is the EPR reference on what retail media networks are, who runs them, what they actually deliver, and why every consumer brand selling through retail now has to operate against the category whether it wants to or not.
What Retail Media Networks Are
A retail media network is a retailer-operated advertising platform that monetizes the retailer's first-party customer data and its owned digital surfaces — website, app, in-store screens, email — to deliver ads from the brands that sell inside the retailer. Amazon Advertising defined the category. Instacart Ads, Kroger Precision Marketing, Roundel (Target's retail media operation), Walmart Connect, Albertsons Media Collective, and the broader CitrusAd platform (now part of Epsilon) have built the category into the scaled second tier.
The structural appeal is closed-loop measurement. The retailer can show the brand exactly which ad impressions drove which purchases inside the retailer's own checkout. No third-party tracking. No platform-to-platform attribution debates. The retail media network reports against shopper sales directly. For consumer brands operating against shrinking third-party measurement signals, this is the cleanest measurement environment in digital advertising.
The Major Platforms
Amazon Advertising remains the dominant player by gross spend — roughly $50B+ in annualized ad revenue, with Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display, and Amazon DSP running as integrated capabilities. Amazon's category leadership shapes the playbook every other retail media operation runs against.
Walmart Connect has scaled into the second-largest U.S. retail media network and the closest scaled competitor to Amazon for CPG and consumer brands. The platform's integration with Walmart's first-party data, in-store digital surfaces, and Sam's Club operations produces a closed-loop measurement environment with measurable scale.
Roundel (Target) runs the most editorial-feeling retail media operation, leveraging Target's brand position for premium CPG and lifestyle categories. The "Target Audience" first-party data product and the Roundel media operation have produced sustained growth through the category cycle.
Kroger Precision Marketing runs the grocery-specific platform with the deepest household-level data set in the U.S. food retail category. The KPM platform's positioning against grocery and CPG brands has driven sustained share gains against the conventional advertising channels CPG historically used.
Instacart Ads sits in an unusual structural position — a marketplace retailer rather than a vertically integrated retailer, with access to first-party data across multiple grocery banners. The Instacart Ads platform produces strong ROI for grocery and household CPG brands and continues to grow share.
CitrusAd (Epsilon) provides retail media network infrastructure to smaller retailers building their own networks — a meta-layer that explains some of the category's growth as second-tier retailers launch their own platforms.
Sponsored Listings and Shopper Marketing
The dominant ad format inside retail media networks is the sponsored product listing — a brand pays for placement in the retailer's search results, category pages, or recommendation surfaces. The format works because it intercepts the buyer at the moment of category intent rather than at the broader brand-awareness layer. Conversion rates run substantially higher than equivalent display advertising.
The discipline has reshaped how CPG and consumer brands allocate their marketing spend. The trade-marketing budget that historically funded retailer slotting fees, in-store displays, and category management has migrated into retail media spend. The brand-marketing budget that historically funded conventional advertising has begun to migrate as well, as brands recognize that retail media converts better for direct-response purchases than equivalent conventional channels.
Commerce Media: The Expanded Category
The broader "commerce media" category — sometimes called retail media plus — includes the retailer-operated networks above plus the broader category of commerce-adjacent advertising platforms. Pinterest Shopping, TikTok Shop's advertising layer, Google Shopping Ads, Meta's commerce surfaces, and the emerging payment-platform networks (Affirm, Klarna, Afterpay) all operate inside the same closed-loop measurement logic.
The category-wide implication for consumer brands is that the marketing dollar increasingly moves to platforms where the brand can directly measure incremental purchase. Conventional brand-awareness advertising still produces value — but the share of marketing spend that closed-loop platforms now command will continue to expand.
In-Store Media: The Next Layer
The 2024-2026 expansion has moved into the physical retail environment. Walmart's in-store digital screens, Target's Bullseye media network in-store, Kroger's KPM in-store integration, and the smart-cart deployments (Instacart's Caper Carts, Amazon's Dash Cart) all extend the retail media network into the physical store. The brands that have invested in the physical-digital integration produce measurable conversion lift at the moment of purchase decision. The brands treating in-store media as a separate trade-marketing layer are losing to the brands that have integrated the two.
Why This Matters for Communications
The growth of retail media networks restructures the communications relationship between consumer brands and the broader media ecosystem. The dollars that historically funded brand-level public relations, brand-awareness advertising, and conventional editorial relationships are migrating into measurable-conversion platforms. The brands that have built communications operations integrated with retail media planning — pairing earned media, brand voice, and retail media spend into a coordinated narrative — produce better outcomes than the brands running them as separate functions.
The retail media category will not stop growing. The brands building the communications discipline to operate against it now will own the operating positions inside the category for years.
The Everything-PR Editorial Team produces original reporting, research, and analysis on communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question. Publishing since 2009.
