Retail media is evolving quickly, and our team has been growing right alongside it, with 50%+ growth in managed media spend in 2025. That momentum has given us a close view of how the landscape is shifting across retailers, platforms, and categories — and where brands should focus to stay competitive.
At Harvest Group, our retail media experts make it a priority to step back from the day-to-day and evaluate where the industry is headed. By looking across channels, partners, and performance trends, we identified seven key themes shaping retail media in 2026.
In this blog, we’re highlighting four of those trends to help brands navigate the evolving landscape and capitalize on emerging opportunities.
4 Retail Media Themes of 2026
1. Retailers as End-to-End Media Partners
Retailers are positioning themselves as full-funnel media ecosystems, extending beyond onsite search into streaming TV, video, audio, and social integrations. According to eMarketer, 40% of advertisers now see retail media as capable of delivering full-funnel outcomes from awareness through conversion.
This shift means more upper-funnel activations are now possible through retail media measurement, data, and partnerships, enabling brands to reach shoppers across the entire path to purchase while maintaining closed-loop attribution.
Paid search remains foundational, but the growing expectation among brands is full-funnel orchestration powered by retailer data.
2. Digital + In-Store Integration
In-store retail media is scaling from experimental to operational. Digital signage, interactive activations, and connected in-store experiences are becoming more measurable and more integrated with online campaigns.
Retailers are enabling cohesive messaging across digital and physical environments, creating retailer-level brand moments that extend beyond the PDP. As in-store capabilities digitize, brands have new opportunities to influence shoppers closer to purchase while aligning messaging across the entire path to purchase. One exception is in-store radio/audio which remains largely unmeasurable, with little development over the past year.
3. AI Beyond Optimization
AI is now fully embedded across retail media planning, creative development, targeting, and bidding. Retailers are leveraging generative tools to adapt creative assets, power search experiences, and automate optimization at scale.
But with increased automation comes a greater need for control and transparency. Brands need to understand how creative assets are being surfaced, how messaging is shaped, and how performance is attributed. For example, automated PDP or search copy generated directly from ratings and reviews without human oversight can shape shopper perception in ways that were never intentionally crafted by the brand.
Human-curated automation remains critical. AI enhances efficiency, but strategic oversight ensures investment decisions, creative integrity, and brand positioning are intentional — not automated by default.
4. Proliferation Requires Prioritization
Increasing demand for media investment isn’t a new theme, but retailers are formalizing media expectations as more build full-funnel capabilities, with clearer sales-based investment thresholds and expanded channel offerings.
And the growth isn’t slowing down. According to eMarketer, US retail media spending reached $60 billion in 2025 and is projected to hit $100 billion by 2028. Disciplined investment, clear objectives, and channel discernment are essential to driving meaningful impact rather than fragmented spend.
Additional Themes
Our complete analysis goes beyond these four themes, uncovering additional developments shaping 2026:
- Management moving closer to the point of sale
- Measurement finally getting more unified
- Better audiences powering the full funnel
Looking to sharpen your retail media strategy?
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