The Pitch Has Changed

For most of the past decade, retail media networks sold one thing: shopper data. The argument was that a retailer knows what you bought, when you bought it and what you almost bought, and that this knowledge makes advertising more accurate than anything an open-web publisher can offer. The argument worked. US retail media ad spending reached $60.32 billion in 2025 and is forecast at $71.09 billion in 2026, roughly 18% year-over-year growth, and the category now accounts for close to 30% of all US digital ad spending.

The new pitch is different. Albertsons, Amazon, Walmart and Instacart are selling creative services, meaning the ideas and the production rather than only the placement.

Albertsons launched its first branded content series in June with Procter & Gamble, a 22-episode run called Rico’s Tacos built using the retailer’s own shopper data. Instacart opened a creative services arm named Instacart Ads Studio, designed to co-create advertising with the CPG companies selling on its platform. Amazon and Walmart are pushing new creative formats that ad buyers describe as materially more interesting than a sponsored product tile.

Why Retailers Need a Story Beyond Targeting

Growth in retail media is concentrating fast. eMarketer projects that Amazon and Walmart will capture 89% of incremental retail media spending in 2026, roughly $9.42 billion of $10.53 billion in net-new investment, with Amazon holding an estimated 75% to 77% of the US market. Around 277 retail media networks operate worldwide. Most of them are competing for whatever remains.

That math explains the move into creative. A mid-sized retailer cannot win a targeting argument against Amazon’s scale, and it cannot win a reach argument either. It can, however, argue that it will build something for the brand that Amazon will not. Services are how smaller networks differentiate once the underlying inventory has become a commodity.

There is a second motive. Retail media budgets have historically come from trade and shopper marketing, which are lower-tier, performance-oriented pools. Brand budgets are larger and controlled by different people. Branded content is the credential a retail media network needs before it can ask for that money.

The Objection From Buyers

Ad buyers are not uniformly convinced, and the skepticism deserves attention.

Ross Walker, director of retail media at Acadia, described current activity as exploratory, with brands testing retailer-hosted creative services to see how performance compares. Nobody has moved significant budget yet.

The deeper objection is structural. Retail media earned its budget by being measurable. A shopper sees an ad, buys a product, and the network attributes the sale. Branded content breaks that chain. A 22-episode series is an awareness asset judged by the metrics awareness assets have always been judged by, and those are precisely the metrics retail media positioned itself against. Some buyers argue that moving into content undermines the value proposition that made the channel attractive in the first place.

There is also a conflict-of-interest question the industry has not resolved. When one company sells the media, produces the creative and reports the results, the incentive to grade its own work generously is obvious. Agencies have spent years defending independence on this exact point.

What Brands Should Actually Test

Treat these offerings as an experiment with a defined hypothesis rather than a new line item.

The first test is whether retailer-produced creative outperforms brand-produced creative in the same placement. That comparison is cheap to run and it isolates the only variable that matters. If the retailer’s shopper data improves the work, it should show up in conversion inside the retailer’s own environment before it shows up anywhere else.

The second test is distribution. Branded content produced by a retailer usually lives on retailer-controlled surfaces, which caps reach. Ask where the series or format will actually run, how many people will see it, and what happens to the asset when the campaign ends. A 22-episode series with no distribution plan outside a grocery app is a production expense, not a media buy.

The third is measurement independence. Insist that the retailer’s own performance reporting be validated against a source the retailer does not control. This is standard practice in every other media channel, and there is no reason retail media should be exempt.

The Bigger Signal

The move into creative services says something about where retail media sits in its lifecycle. Channels sell targeting when targeting is scarce. When targeting becomes universal, they sell service.

Retail media spent five years convincing marketers that first-party data was the answer to a post-cookie world. It won that argument. Now every large retailer holds the same data advantage, the two biggest players are absorbing nearly all the growth, and differentiation has to come from somewhere else. Creative services are the somewhere else.

For marketers, the practical read is that leverage has shifted. When a channel starts offering to do more work for the same money, it is a buyer’s market. That is a better moment to renegotiate terms than to expand commitments.