A Channel That Has Outgrown Its Accountability

The growth numbers for retail media in 2026 are difficult to contextualize without pausing to consider their scale. Twenty-nine percent of all digital advertising spend now flows to retail media networks, a share that has doubled in three years and shows no sign of decelerating. Brands work across an average of six retail media networks simultaneously, a figure projected to reach eleven by the end of 2026. Amazon alone generated $17.2 billion in advertising services revenue in Q1 2026, growing 22% year-on-year. Walmart Connect, Instacart, Kroger Precision Marketing, Target’s Roundel, and dozens of regional and category-specific networks have collectively created one of the most fragmented advertising environments in the history of the industry.

The commercial logic that drove this growth is real and durable: retail media networks offer something no other advertising channel can match, which is closed-loop attribution built on actual purchase data, from a consumer already in a shopping mindset, measured against real transaction records rather than modeled inference. The promise is the most accountable advertising possible. The gap between that promise and what most brands actually experience is the defining tension in retail media today, and it is growing more acute, not less, as the channel’s scale increases.

What the Data Actually Shows

Research conducted by Skai in partnership with Stratably, surveying 166 retail media advertisers, produced findings that should concern every organization allocating significant budget to this channel. Only 15% of respondents report strong confidence in their measurement, meaning the vast majority make budget decisions on a channel representing nearly a third of their digital advertising spend without being able to reliably verify what that spend produces. Nearly half describe themselves as struggling with measurement altogether.

The specific challenges brands identify reveal something important about the nature of the problem. Incrementality, understood as knowing not just whether sales occurred following an ad exposure but whether those sales would have occurred without the advertising, is cited as the top challenge by 75% of respondents. Cross-channel measurement comes in second at 59%. What is notably absent from the top barriers is tools or data availability. The problem is not a shortage of information. It is a shortage of the capability, methodology, and organizational alignment required to turn that information into defensible conclusions. The measurement challenge is compounded by a structural feature of the retail media landscape with no equivalent in search or social advertising: every network is a walled garden with its own metrics, definitions, and reporting interfaces that cannot be directly compared.

The Incrementality Gap

The commercial stakes of the measurement failure become clear when examining the gap between what brands hope incrementality measurement will deliver and what they currently achieve. Sixty-eight percent of brands hope to improve profit margins through retail media incrementality insights; only 24% have achieved meaningful progress. Forty-two percent hope to improve customer lifetime value; only 22% are realizing it. Forrester analysis found 86% of commerce media decision-makers in North America and Europe describing measurement improvement as a high or critical priority. The IAB has acknowledged the problem formally, releasing a framework for maturing in-store media measurement that recognizes what brands have been experiencing operationally: slow adoption driven by operational complexity, inconsistent standards, and a lack of comparability across networks.

What Separates Leaders From Everyone Else

A distinct tier of retail media leaders has emerged whose practices separate them from the broader market in commercially meaningful ways. Leaders allocate 27% of their total media budgets to retail media versus 23% for laggards, a four-percentage-point gap that compounds into significant advantage over time. They activate across an average of 7.2 networks versus 6.2 for laggards, building a broader footprint that generates more cross-network performance data. Critically, they have invested in incrementality measurement as a recurring practice rather than an occasional test, building the capability to use it as a strategic tool rather than a one-off efficiency exercise. The practical path forward is not a new technology solution; it is the analytics capability to process cross-network data into consistent conclusions, the internal governance to assign clear ownership, and the willingness to push retail media networks for standardized metrics that allow performance comparison across platforms. Retail media has grown up. Its measurement infrastructure is still catching up; the brands that close that gap fastest will spend their budgets better than everyone still flying blind.