Retail Media & CTV in 2026: The New Performance Frontier

If you are deciding where incremental performance budget should go in the second half of 2026, the short answer is retail media and connected TV. They are the two fastest-growing advertising channels in the US, they both run on first-party data, and they both offer measurement that gets closer to a real outcome than open-web display ever did. The advertisers pulling away from the pack are not running them as separate experiments. They are running them as one connected system.

Here is the spend picture, and then how to actually operate against it.

Where is the ad spend actually moving in 2026?

Toward commerce and streaming, and away from almost everything else.

US retail media ad spending is forecast to reach $69.33 billion in 2026, up 17.9% from $58.79 billion in 2025, according to EMARKETER. That is roughly double the pace of overall US digital ad spend, which the IAB projects will grow around 9.5% this year. Retail media now accounts for close to 18% of every US digital ad dollar. A channel that barely registered five years ago is now the third pillar of digital advertising alongside search and social.

Connected TV is the other side of the shift. The IAB's 2026 Outlook Study projects 13.8% growth in US CTV ad spend, up from 11.4% in 2025, second only to social media at 14.6%. EMARKETER puts total US CTV ad spend at roughly $38 billion in 2026. Linear TV, by contrast, is forecast to decline. The audience moved to streaming, and the money is following with a lag.

Two caveats worth holding onto. First, retail media's growth is decelerating from its earlier 20%-plus pace, and it is heavily concentrated: Amazon and Walmart are expected to capture about 89% of incremental US retail media dollars in 2026. Second, "CTV growth" depends on how you scope it. The IAB's standalone Outlook figure is 13.8%; its later digital-video report measures CTV-within-video at a lower rate. The direction is not in doubt. The decimal point depends on the methodology.

Why do these two channels actually perform?

Because they solve the problem that broke open-web display: weak data and weaker measurement.

Retail media works because the network knows what you bought. When you advertise on a retailer's platform, you are buying against logged-in, first-party purchase behavior, not an inferred third-party segment. You can target someone who has the category in their cart, and in many cases you can see whether your ad led to a sale on that same platform. That closed loop is the entire value proposition. It is why retail media commands premium rates and why brands keep moving budget into it even as the broader market tightens.

CTV works for an adjacent reason. It delivers the reach and full-screen attention of television, but on an addressable, data-driven, increasingly measurable footprint. You are not buying a daypart and hoping. You are buying audiences, and you can connect exposure to downstream behavior. Cross-platform measurement adoption among advertisers rose to 72% in the IAB's 2026 outlook, up from 64% a year earlier, which is the maturity signal that gives performance teams permission to fund the channel seriously.

This is also why first-party data is the through-line of every 2026 media conversation. Google ultimately reversed its plan to deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome in April 2025 and wound down its Privacy Sandbox APIs in late 2025. Cookies did not vanish. But the broader signal loss from privacy regulation, browser changes, and platform walls is real and permanent, and it makes channels built on durable first-party data structurally more valuable. Retail media and CTV both sit on exactly that foundation. That is not a coincidence. It is the reason they are growing.

Are retail media and CTV really separate channels anymore?

Less every quarter. They are converging, and the smart move is to plan for the merge rather than fight it.

Retailers are no longer just selling sponsored search slots on their own sites. They are building off-site inventory, and CTV is a primary target. EMARKETER projects retail-media-powered CTV at roughly $6 billion in the US in 2026, and off-site retail media is growing about twice as fast as on-site through 2026. Walmart's acquisition of Vizio is the clearest expression of the strategy: a retailer with first-party purchase data buying a path to the living room screen. When a network can show you a streaming ad and then attribute it to a purchase in its own stores, the line between "retail media" and "CTV" stops being meaningful.

For an advertiser, the practical implication is that you should stop budgeting these as two unrelated line items reviewed by two different teams. CTV is where you build awareness and demand at scale. Retail media is where you capture the intent that demand creates. Run them in one plan, with one audience strategy, and the whole funnel compounds. That is the work we do inside omnichannel digital integration, and it is the difference between two channels that each look fine in isolation and a system that actually moves revenue.

How do you run retail media and CTV in a full funnel?

Three principles separate the operators from the dabblers.

1. Lead with audience, not channel. Define who you are trying to reach and what you want them to do, then map CTV and retail media to stages of that journey. CTV carries the top and middle: it introduces the brand, builds consideration, and seeds demand on the biggest screen in the house. Retail media carries the bottom: it intercepts shoppers at the moment of intent and converts. When the same audience definition drives both, your CTV impressions stop being a vanity reach number and start feeding a measurable downstream conversion. Building that connected motion across paid media is the core of how we run it.

2. Insist on one measurement framework. The single biggest failure mode is letting each platform grade its own homework. Retail networks report their own attributed sales; CTV platforms report their own outcomes; neither accounts for the other or for halo effects across the funnel. You need an independent view that ties exposure to incremental revenue and that does not double-count. Closed-loop attribution is the entire reason these channels earn premium budgets, so the measurement layer is not optional infrastructure. It is the product. This is where analytics and attribution does the heavy lifting, because without it you are guessing with a bigger budget.

3. Treat concentration as a planning input. Because Amazon and Walmart dominate retail media, your strategy on the two giants is different from your strategy on a scaled second-tier network or on emerging in-store and CTV inventory. In-store retail media is the fastest-growing slice, forecast to climb about 33% in 2026, but it is still under 1% of total retail media spend, so it is a test, not a tentpole. Put your reliable volume where the scale and measurement already exist, and use the long tail to learn.

The takeaway for the rest of 2026

Retail media and connected TV are growing fast for the same underlying reason: they are built on first-party data and they can prove they worked. That is precisely what every other channel is struggling to do in a privacy-constrained, signal-poor environment. The opportunity in the second half of 2026 is not simply to buy more of each. It is to stop running them in separate boxes and start running them as one full-funnel engine, with a shared audience strategy and a single, independent measurement spine.

That is harder than launching a campaign, and it is where most teams stall. If you want to build the connected version rather than the siloed one, that is exactly the work our consumer DTC and marketplaces and proptech teams do every day.

Sources

• EMARKETER — US Retail Media Ad Spending Will Near $70 Billion in 2026
• EMARKETER — Retail Media Ad Spending Forecast H1 2026
• IAB — 2026 Outlook Study Forecasts 9.5% Growth in US Ad Spend (CTV +13.8%)
• EMARKETER — Digital Video Forecast and Trends Q2 2026
• EMARKETER — FAQ on Shoppable Media
• EMARKETER — Off-Site Retail Media Will Grow 2x the Rate of On-Site Through 2026
• EMARKETER — In-Store Experience Becomes Retail's Pressure Valve (2026)
• IAPP — Google Ends Third-Party Cookie Phaseout Plans
• OneTrust — Google Drops Third-Party Cookie Choice Prompt in Chrome