US retail media ad spend is on pace to hit $71.09 billion in 2026, up roughly 18% from last year, and almost all of the new money is flowing to two companies. That is the uncomfortable backdrop behind a fresh run of product launches landing this week, all of them chasing the same unglamorous problem: how do brands actually run campaigns across a dozen retailer ad platforms without drowning in dashboards.
The newest example dropped today. Ad automation vendor Shirofune switched on a Walmart Connect integration on July 16, letting advertisers and agencies manage Walmart retail media campaigns inside the same tool they already use for Google, Meta and TikTok. Budget pacing, keyword bids, daily optimization, all in one place instead of five browser tabs.
Small news on its own. But it is a clean signal of where the whole category is heading in the back half of 2026.
The money is stacking up at the very top
Retail media is not just growing, it is concentrating. eMarketer pegs US spend at $71.09 billion this year, up from $60.32 billion in 2025. Of the roughly $10.53 billion in fresh spend coming into the channel, Amazon and Walmart are set to swallow $9.42 billion of it. That is 89% of every new dollar.
Here is the split that everyone in the room is watching:
- Amazon Ads: about 79.7% of the US retail media market in 2025, and roughly $68 billion in ad revenue for the year.
- Walmart Connect: around 8% share, $6.4 billion in ad revenue in 2025, up 37% globally.
- Target Roundel: a distant third at roughly 1.5%.
- Worldwide: retail media climbs 12.4% to $196.7 billion in 2026.
The IAB expects retail and commerce media to drive around $74 billion in US ad spend this year, so even the roomy forecasts are enormous. So the pitch to smaller retailers and to brands is not ‘spend more’. Everyone is already spending more. The pitch now is ‘spend it smarter, and prove it worked’.
Why ‘operationalization’ is suddenly the word
Shirofune CEO Mitsunaga Kikuchi put it plainly in the launch note, saying retail media is becoming a permanent pillar of the modern advertising stack, but its value depends on operationalization. Ugly word, real point.
The company says it now manages over 300,000 active campaigns across more than 13,000 accounts, with agencies like Dentsu Digital on the client list. That scale is the tell. When a mid-size brand is buying ads on Amazon, Walmart, Instacart, Target and a grocery chain or two, nobody has the headcount to babysit each platform by hand.
This is the part of the market that grew up fast and got messy. The dollars arrived before the plumbing did.
The measurement problem nobody has fixed
For all the growth, trust is thin. Recent industry surveys found only about 15% of marketers feel they measure retail media effectively, and a striking 94% say they do not fully trust the metrics retailers report back to them.
That gap matters more as budgets swell. Finance teams are asking harder questions about return, and the answer that the retailer told us it worked does not land well when you are moving eight-figure sums. Closed-loop measurement, tying an ad view to an actual basket, is the thing brands keep asking for and rarely feel they get.
It is also why standards bodies are moving. IAB Europe rolled out updated Commerce Media Measurement Standards earlier this year, with a grace period that runs through the end of July 2026. The industry is basically trying to agree on what a good number even looks like.
Agentic AI is the next battleground
The other shift is who, or what, runs the campaign. Walmart Connect spent the first half of 2026 pushing AI deeper into its ad stack, including a Sponsored Search assistant that handles bidding and billing, plus ads woven into its Sparky shopping agent. Walmart says 81% of its shoppers are open to using Sparky to research products, which is a huge surface to sell against.
The dollars behind that push are not small. Walmart Connect posted $4.4 billion in ad revenue in the third quarter of 2025 alone, growing 33% in the US, while Amazon pulled in $17.7 billion from ads in the same stretch. Amazon has also been here longer with its Rufus assistant and campaign tools.
So the retail media race is quietly turning into an AI race, both on the shopper side, where an agent recommends the product, and on the advertiser side, where an agent buys the media. Automation vendors like Shirofune are sliding into the middle of that, betting brands would rather run everything from one neutral cockpit than get locked into each retailer’s own tools.
What it means for retailers and brands right now
For brands, the near-term move is boring but real: consolidate the busywork, then spend the freed-up hours on creative and measurement, the two things automation cannot do for you. Cutting the platform-hopping is also the cheapest way to squeeze more out of budgets that are not getting any smaller.
For smaller retailers eyeing their own ad network, the takeaway is blunter. A media business without clean reporting and easy buying is going to struggle against the giants that already own 89% of the growth.
Retail media crossed from land-grab into operations mode sometime this year. The $71 billion is real. The question for the rest of 2026 is who can actually run it, measure it, and keep advertisers believing the numbers. Today’s launches are small pieces of a much bigger scramble to answer that.