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Retail Media is Growing Fast - But Most of the Money Still Isn't Where the Shoppers Are
Blog · 11 September 2026
Global retail media spend is on track to reach roughly $165 billion in 2026, up from around $140 billion in 2024 — growth of 17.6% year-on-year in 2025 alone, enough to put retail media alongside search and social as one of the three biggest advertising channels. By some projections, it could overtake social media spend entirely within two to three years.
But one statistic in the latest data deserves more attention than the topline growth number: roughly 85% of grocery shopping still happens in a physical store, while around 90% of retail media ad spend is still going to online placements. That's a significant mismatch between where retailers' media budgets are being spent and where their customers are actually standing.
It's not a surprising gap, historically — online retail media (sponsored search results, on-site placements) has been easier to measure and easier to sell programmatically than in-store advertising ever was. A banner ad's performance is trivial to report on; a screen in aisle 7 has, until recently, been much harder to tie to an actual sale or even an actual view.
That measurement gap is exactly what's closing now, largely because Vision AI and better in-store content management are starting to work together — software that can tell a retailer or media owner not just that a screen displayed an ad, but whether anyone was actually looking at it, for how long, and under what conditions. As that measurement problem gets solved, expect the 90/10 online-offline split in retail media spend to start correcting itself, and expect the businesses that already have both the screens and the measurement layer in place to be the ones best positioned when it does.