Retail media hits $200bn, the store lags

WARC Media’s latest forecast puts global retail media investment at $200.4bn in 2026, rising 11.5% to $223.4bn in 2027 — by then 15.2% of all global advertising. Reported on 21 August, it is the number that will be quoted in every retail-media deck for the next twelve months.

Two figures underneath it are more useful. Strip out Amazon and 2027 growth falls to 9.8%, the slowest year WARC has recorded since it began tracking the channel. And the part of retail media that happens in a physical store — the screens, the shelf, the moment of purchase itself — remains, in the trade’s own description, among the least developed areas of the fastest-growing channel in advertising.

What happened

Global retail media ad spend: $200.4bn in 2026, forecast to reach $223.4bn in 2027 (+11.5%) and 15.2% of total global ad investment by then (WARC Media — primary forecast, modelled).
Excluding Amazon, 2027 growth drops to 9.8% — the lowest annual rate since WARC began monitoring retail media spend (WARC Media — primary forecast).
Amazon accounted for 78% of US retail media spend in 2025, Walmart a further 7.5%, leaving 14.5% for every other retail media network combined (WARC Media — primary).
Category concentration is extreme: WARC expects retail media to take 55.8% of global alcoholic-drinks media investment and 54.9% of food by 2027 (WARC Media — primary forecast).
Trade commentary alongside the forecast notes in-store remains one of the least developed areas of retail media, held back by immature measurement and the absence of standard format conventions (invidis — trade analysis, directional).
Cited alongside it: more than 60% of US grocery shoppers say they bought a product after seeing it on an in-store screen (shopper survey via invidis — vendor survey, directional; consistent with the 62% we covered previously).
The read: the money is real, the concentration is the problem, and the physical screen is where the unclaimed part of it sits (BDOOH analysis).

A $200bn channel that is mostly one company’s search results

The single most clarifying line in this forecast is the market-share one. 78% of US retail media spend went to Amazon in 2025. Add Walmart and roughly six dollars in seven are with two retailers. What the industry calls “retail media” is, financially, an on-site search-advertising market with a long tail attached.

That matters for how the rest of the number should be read. When a retailer’s media network reports growth, it is competing for the 14.5%, not the 78%. And when growth outside Amazon slows to 9.8%, the tail is where the slowdown lands first — which is why the same coverage carries warnings about ad load and clutter degrading effectiveness.

The structural comparison with place-based media is laid out in retail media versus place-based DOOH: they are sold to the same budget holders and measured by different rules, and the difference in rules is why one scaled to $200bn and the other did not.

In-store is the underbuilt part, and that is the opening

The gap is not demand. Shoppers respond to in-store screens — the survey figure quoted alongside the forecast is above 60%, in line with the 62% Grocery TV number we reviewed earlier this year. The gap is infrastructure: no standard formats, immature measurement, and networks assembled retailer by retailer.

That is a familiar list. It is the same list a beauty network faces, and the reason beauty DOOH versus in-store retail media treats them as adjacent rather than identical businesses. The retailer has one asset a salon does not — first-party purchase data, which is what converts a screen into “retail media” pricing. The salon has one the retailer does not: a seated, unhurried audience in a service context, for whom the category on screen is the reason they came.

What a beauty operator should take from it

Do not price as retail media without retail data. Retail media rates are underwritten by closed-loop sales attribution. Without a transaction to attribute to, a beauty screen is place-based inventory and should be priced as the moment, not benchmarked against a retailer’s CPM.
The endemic budget is moving into this channel, not away from it. Food and alcohol are forecast above 50% of media investment in retail media by 2027. Beauty is not published in that split, but the same commercial logic — proximity to purchase, retailer leverage — applies to cosmetics. That budget shift is the context for how to add beauty DOOH to your media mix.
Standardisation is the cheap advantage. The stated in-store weaknesses are format conventions and measurement. A small network can adopt standard creative sizes and a clean delivery report on day one — see the DOOH creative spec reference and proof of play — and be more legible to a buyer than a large retailer’s bespoke estate.
Expect the retail-media buyer, not the OOH buyer. As the in-store screen gets absorbed into the retail-media brief — the pattern in retail media swallows the in-store screen — the person deciding may not be an out-of-home planner at all.

The caveats

A forecast is a model, not a measurement. WARC’s figures are estimates built on reported spend, currency assumptions and category modelling, and retail media has no agreed definition boundary — whether in-store screens, sampling, or retailer social spend count varies by source, which is one reason totals differ by tens of billions between houses. The in-store “least developed” characterisation is trade analysis, not a measured share; WARC’s published split does not isolate in-store spend. The shopper-survey figure is vendor-run and self-reported, and stated purchase claims routinely overstate behaviour.

Nothing here is beauty-specific. There is no published beauty share of retail media, and no reliable public beauty CPM to convert one into a rate.

Sources

WARC Media — global retail media forecast, reported 21 Aug 2026: $200.4bn in 2026; $223.4bn in 2027 (+11.5%); 15.2% of total global ad investment by 2027; ex-Amazon growth of 9.8% in 2027, the lowest since WARC began tracking the channel; Amazon 78% and Walmart 7.5% of US retail media spend in 2025; retail media forecast at 55.8% of global alcoholic-drinks and 54.9% of food media investment by 2027. Primary but modelled — a forecast, with the definitional caveats above. invidis, 21 Aug 2026 — trade analysis accompanying the forecast: in-store remains among the least developed areas of retail media, constrained by measurement maturity and the absence of standard format conventions; cites a shopper survey in which more than 60% of US grocery shoppers report purchasing after seeing a product on an in-store screen (vendor survey, self-reported — directional; consistent with the 62% Grocery TV figure covered separately). No beauty-specific benchmark is asserted.