What 2026 has in store for commerce media, according to experts

Throughout 2025, retail media continued to outgrow, well, retail.

Case in point: WPP recently expanded its commerce-driven ad revenue reporting to include travel and financial services media networks in the network’s recent advertising forecast, reflecting retail media’s evolution into commerce media as brands from more categories have joined in. The agency’s forecast predicts that commerce media will account for 15.6% of total ad revenue in 2025 and 17.2% by 2030. That 15.6% represents about $178.2 billion in ad revenue, bringing the spend above that of total TV ad revenue for the first time.

“One of the most significant shifts in 2026 will be the redefinition of what ‘retail’ actually means,” Nick Van Sicklen, CEO of luxury marketing agency Interluxe Group, told us in an email, noting that he expects luxury brands to grow their own efforts in the space. “Travel, hospitality, automotive, and experience-led brands are increasingly behaving like retailers, owning first-party demand signals and transaction data.”

To understand how the retail, er, commerce media landscape will continue to evolve in 2026, we caught up with experts in the space to understand what could be coming next, be it consolidation or disruption.

More options—and more appetite for simplicity

Despite the growth in the space, commerce media may be headed for a slowdown, at least in terms of new entrants. While there are still new companies opening their own commerce media offerings (Mastercard, for example, got on the bandwagon in October), the number of brands entering the category has seemed to settle down.

In 2026, “it’s a little bit of [a] cool-off, but it’s also a little bit of stabilize and plateau,” Avery Akkineni, CMO at VaynerX, told Marketing Brew. “There was a lot of energy in the last three years around building new retail media teams, hiring specific individuals to do that, standing those up, really refining your strategy, because there was an explosion of available retail media networks, from Instacart to Target to Walmart.”

While marketers explored those opportunities—and brands with first-party data continued to enter the space for the chance to scoop up ad dollars—there’s only so much money and testing marketers will be able to endure before they zero in on the networks that are most effective for their brands.

Freddy Dabaghi, chief transformation officer at Crispin, expects there will continue to be more retailers pushing into commerce media, along with some consolidation coming to the category. Rather than working with dozens of commerce media players, marketers may be more keen to test out new opportunities through ad-tech vendors, where spend through those platforms can be streamlined.

“Consolidation is where we’ll start shifting more toward,” Dabaghi said. “We’ve been looking very closely at Criteo as they expanded their connectivity, and Skai as the solution we’ve been working closely with…as retailers add in solutions, we can layer on existing tech and expand.”

About those AI agents…

Regardless of whether or not consolidation comes for commerce media, the disruption of how people shop online (read: use AI agents) will likely continue in 2026, which experts predict will have ripple effects in commerce media. If referral traffic to commerce media players’ websites craters as people use AI agents or search on LLMs, that could shake things up.

“AI agents really become not just a threat to retail media, but truly an existential threat,” Tyler Murray, chief enterprise solutions officer for VML in North America, told Marketing Brew, although he noted that it will all depend on how the technology is deployed, and how it affects consumer behavior.

Marketers, he said, will have to watch how people use AI agents to shop, whether they gravitate toward offerings like Amazon’s Rufus or Walmart’s Sparky, or to LLMs like ChatGPT, which has partnerships with major retailers like Target.

“That’s going to be a real battle for the soul of retail media next year,” he said. “I don’t think consumer adoption is going to increase so much that will fully kill retail media networks, but next year is definitely the grounds of a big strategic warfare around where retailers should place their bets.”

That doesn’t mean commerce media players should wait around to see how the market adopts AI agents. Murray believes a refocus on in-store spending will be necessary to manage the potential effects of AI agents on commerce media.

“The best strategic moat retailers can do to combat AI is to shift dollars towards in-store retail media, because there’s no AI that’s impacting shoppers as they’re in Walmart going down aisle seven,” he said. “Retailers like Walmart, they’re investing massively in that [in-store media] so they’re building things like 170,000 digital screens throughout their store. And it’s not just digital screens, it’s also in-store radio…that’ll be another battleground.”