The Money Is Concentrating. The Survivors Will Be The Networks That Stopped Pretending To Be Amazon.

The Money Is Concentrating. The Survivors Will Be The Networks That Stopped Pretending To Be Amazon.

A few hundred retail media networks are competing for a sliver of growth that two companies have already mostly claimed. The industry’s own trade body has put a clock on the reckoning, telling networks they have a narrow window to choose a strategy or have one chosen for them by the market. The more useful version of that question sits on the buyer’s side of the table, where brands are deciding which of these networks is worth funding for the next three years.

US advertisers will spend $69.33 billion on retail media in 2026, up from $58.79 billion in 2025, according to EMARKETER’s retail media forecast published in December 2025. The growth figure is where the story actually sits. EMARKETER projects $10.53 billion in new spending that year, and $9.42 billion of it will go to Amazon Ads and Walmart Connect, which works out to more than 89 percent of the year’s incremental retail media dollars landing at two companies. That leaves roughly a billion dollars of growth to be divided among everyone else.

Set that against the sell side. EMARKETER’s more recent forecast, published in May 2026, describes retail media settling into a clearer hierarchy: Amazon dominant at the top, a scaled second tier taking shape beneath it, and a crowded long tail of smaller networks falling further behind. The field keeps widening as commerce media networks launch across travel, financial services, and rideshare, each one more competition for the same brand budgets. The concentration data reframes the central planning question for the brand teams and retail media buyers who allocate spending across a dozen or more networks. The question is no longer whether non-Amazon, non-Walmart retail media is worth funding. It is how to tell which of the networks below the top two are building something durable enough to fund.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau put a structure to that question in April. At its Connected Commerce Summit, the IAB released a report, “Building a More Competitive Commerce Media Ecosystem,” which opens by warning networks that they have a window of roughly 24 to 36 months to make explicit strategic choices, after which the market will sort them implicitly, in ways the report says they did not intend. The framing matters for buyers because it is the industry’s own trade body conceding what the spending data already shows. The market will not sustain a few hundred undifferentiated networks all selling the same sponsored-product inventory and all describing themselves as the next scaled platform.

The Six Paths Double As A Buyer’s Diagnostic

The report lays out six paths a network can choose, and read from the buyer’s side they become a diagnostic. The first is the one most networks were funded to pursue and few can afford: build the full-stack, full-funnel, self-serve platform and compete head-on for national brand budgets. The IAB is blunt about the cost of entry, which includes a marketplace model, deep first-party data, and the willingness to absorb heavy losses for years before the business turns. The second path carries no press release. It means taking a modest share, running lean, staying profitable, and treating media as a margin contribution instead of a growth engine. The remaining four sit between those poles. A network can integrate media into merchandising so that category growth, not ad load, governs the business. Another competes on experience, using native and in-store formats that improve the shopping trip without interrupting it. A third becomes infrastructure, providing the technology, data, or measurement that other networks run on. The last pools reach with other networks into a coalition large enough for brand budgets to take seriously.

The second tier is where the real allocation work now lives. The top two networks are a given in most plans. The pass-or-fund decisions happen among the retailers forming that scaled second tier, and a network’s chosen path is the most reliable public signal of whether spending there is going somewhere with a future.

The clearest live examples sit outside the top two, and each reads as a path made legible. Best Buy is pursuing scale with intent. Lisa Valentino, president of Best Buy Ads, told The Drum in December 2025 that the company aims to grow its offsite advertising business “meaningfully larger” than its onsite business, with offsite eventually representing the majority of revenue. That describes a company rebuilding itself around media, not a retailer bolting an ad unit onto the side, and it signals a network a brand can treat as a developing full-funnel partner instead of a sponsored-product line item. Home Depot is the most committed version of the merchant-integration path. At its Infronts event in Atlanta in April 2026, the retailer’s media network, Orange Apron Media, opened not with its ad-product leaders but with Billy Bastek, executive vice president of merchandising, who framed the network’s governing idea as media aligned to the merchant, not media running alongside it. To a supplier, that signals a network where category and media decisions are made together, which changes how a brand structures the conversation and who it needs in the room.

Further down the field, the most consequential choice is often the decision not to build at all. The Raley’s Companies, a regional grocery operator, launched an in-store retail media network across 208 stores in June 2026 through the in-store media platform Grocery TV, joining an established network without standing up its own. The pattern is becoming the regional-grocer default: reach scale by plugging into existing infrastructure and skip the capital and operating cost of building from scratch.

The Riskiest Networks Are The Ones That Never Chose

The paths to read most carefully are the ones a network has not actually chosen. The shared argument of the IAB report and EMARKETER’s forecasts is that the networks at greatest risk are those still running the scale playbook without the scale economics to support it. They outsource the ad sales, license the cheapest available technology, defer the organizational change, and ride sponsored-product margin while telling the board the original forecast is intact. A network in that posture is the one most likely to be sorted out inside the IAB’s 24-to-36-month window, and a brand committing multi-year budget and integration work to it is backing a business that may be managed toward contraction. The diagnostic the framework hands buyers is concrete. A network that can name its path and show the investment behind it is a safer multi-year commitment than one whose strategy is indistinguishable from a dozen others.

The implication splits by buyer type. For a large brand running a portfolio across many networks, the framework works as triage: anchor the plan on the scaled players, then fund second-tier networks selectively where a chosen path matches the brand’s category and goals, a merchant-integrated network for a brand that needs category partnership, an experience-led network for a product that demands demonstration or sampling. For a mid-market brand with budget across only a handful of networks, the cost of backing one that gets sorted out is proportionally higher, which argues for concentrating spend where a network’s path and investment are legible. For a brand newer to retail media and building its first multi-network plan, the framework is a caution against treating every network’s scale pitch as equivalent, because the spending data shows most of those pitches describe an outcome the math will not support.

One structural development sits underneath the coalition and infrastructure paths. In May 2026, Publicis Groupe announced an agreement to acquire LiveRamp, the data collaboration platform, for an enterprise value of about $2.2 billion, a deal the companies expect to close before the end of 2026 pending regulatory and shareholder approval. LiveRamp is part of the neutral data infrastructure that independent coalitions and smaller networks rely on to connect data across partners, and its move inside a major advertising holding company is the kind of consolidation that makes that neutral layer harder to assemble independently. The coalition path is the one the IAB frames as the natural lifeline for networks that cannot reach scale alone, and it depends on exactly this infrastructure staying neutral. Whether it does, as the LiveRamp deal moves toward its expected close, is the open question for any buyer deciding how much reach to source through coalition models over the next two years.

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