What changed · Ad tech
Retail media is a $196B market where attribution actually works
A channel where the platform can see the purchase is structurally different from one where it has to infer it.
20 August 2026 · 5 minute read
Retail media, advertising placed on retailer properties and measured against purchases made there, is a market of roughly $196 billion and growing quickly. The reason is straightforward: the retailer sees the transaction, so attribution is observed rather than modelled. That solves the problem the rest of digital advertising has been struggling with since the cookie declined. For a consumer brand selling through retailers or marketplaces, it deserves a place in the plan. It is not a replacement for brand building, and treating it as one is the most common mistake.
Why is it growing so fast?
Three reasons compound.
- Attribution is observed. The retailer sees the ad and the purchase, in the same session, on the same logged-in account. No modelling required.
- Intent is high. Someone browsing a retailer is closer to buying than someone scrolling a feed.
- Retailers want the margin. Media revenue is far higher margin than retail, which means retailers are investing in these networks aggressively.
What is the catch?
Several, and they are worth naming because the growth story usually omits them.
- You are renting the relationship. The customer is the retailer's, and so is the data. You get performance, not a customer.
- Measurement is graded by the seller. The retailer sells the ad and reports the result, which is a conflict worth remembering.
- It is bottom of funnel. It converts demand that already exists. It does not create demand, and a plan that is all retail media eventually runs out of demand to convert.
- Fragmentation. Every retailer has its own network, its own interface, and its own reporting.
The trap
Retail media reports very well because it captures purchases that were largely going to happen. If you judge it purely on its own reported return, it will always look like the best channel you have, and shifting your whole budget into it is how brands stop growing while their dashboards look excellent.
Where does it belong in a plan?
As the conversion layer beneath demand you created elsewhere. It works best when something else is making people want your product, and retail media is there at the moment they act on it.
For brands selling through marketplaces in India, this is already a significant share of category spend, and the brands doing well are the ones combining it with demand creation rather than substituting it.
A channel that only harvests demand will always look like your best performer, right up until the point where there is no demand left to harvest.
If you are an agency
Retail media is a genuine growth area for agency services and a genuine reporting hazard. Be explicit with clients about incrementality: agree upfront how you will judge whether retail media created a sale or captured one. Agencies that skip that conversation end up defending a channel mix that quietly stopped growing the business.
How we do this ourselves
Media Planning holds retail media alongside your other buys in one structure, so a plan reflects everything rather than everything except the part that lives in a retailer portal. Analytics joins the outcomes back to your own segments, which is the check on whether it created demand or captured it.
How Media Planning works