Why Retail Media is the Next Frontier for Partnerships

Across brands, retail media has become a core lever for reaching high-intent shoppers at the point of purchase, allowing forward-thinking retailers to promote products within their existing ecosystem. 

It has evolved into one of the most effective ways for brands to connect with high-intent buyers. By sitting close to the point of purchase and offering closed-loop measurement, it provides a more direct path to sales and return on investment than many upper-funnel channels. 

What’s Fueling Retail Media’s Growth? 

Retail media represents a significant and growing share of digital investment, with U.S. retail media ad spend projected to reach $107.6 billion by 2026, roughly 30 percent of all U.S. digital ad spend. 

These budget shifts are not happening in isolation. They reflect broader changes brands are navigating across commerce, media, and measurement. 

• Commerce is increasingly marketplace and third-party-led. Brands are leaning into third-party models for greater control, margin flexibility, and operational leverage, particularly as they manage international expansion and marketplace complexity. This expands the inventory, data, and closed-loop signals retailers can monetize. 

• Budgets are moving toward measurable performance. In uncertain conditions, brands pull back from channels with weaker accountability and reinvest in those closest to purchase. Retail media benefits because it offers a clearer line of sight to outcomes. 

• Retailers now hold the “new cookie.” With authenticated shopper data and transaction-level insight, retailers can offer targeting and measurement capabilities that much of the open web has lost. 

• Retail media is no longer confined to onsite placements. Offsite activation, including connected TV (CTV), allows retailers to turn their audiences into scalable, full-funnel media products and attract incremental media investment beyond onsite placements. 

As retail media matures, the next shift is already underway. Partnerships are becoming a natural extension of retail media, helping brands drive incremental demand and capture it within retailer ecosystems. 

Why Retail Media is the Next Frontier for Partnerships 

Despite its scale, retail media has historically had limited overlap with affiliate and partnership programs. This was not due to lack of relevance, but practical constraints in infrastructure, funding models, and measurement. Routing vendor or retail media budgets through partnerships required manual processes, rigid pricing models, and complex reconciliation. This is changing. 

Affiliate and partnership infrastructure has matured to support retail media use cases at scale, removing the barriers that historically kept these channels separate. 

Key changes include: 

• Vendor-funded campaigns can coexist with always-on partner programs. Modern tracking and attribution allow campaign-based retail media budgets to run alongside core affiliate and influencer programs without disrupting partner economics. 

• Flexible pricing and measurement models unlock scale. Cost-per-click (CPC), hybrid, and campaign-based constructs align more closely with retailer pricing structures while maintaining performance accountability. 

• Standardized reporting enables cross-channel consistency. Partners can now share impression, click, and conversion data in formats that map cleanly to internal retail media and commerce reporting, reducing friction between retail media and partnership teams. 

What previously required manual workarounds can now be executed consistently, allowing partnerships to play a scalable role within retail media strategies. 

Why Siloed Media Buying is Breaking Down 

Internally, these shifts are putting pressure on how brands plan, fund, and measure media. 

Fragmentation across media, content, marketplace operations, and measurement leads to duplicated work, inconsistent reporting, and slower optimization. Retail media also touches multiple P&Ls at once. It functions as a trade lever, a media investment, and a commerce growth driver, and siloed ownership often results in budget competition rather than incrementality planning. 

At the same time, executive teams are increasingly asking which investments are driving incremental sales rather than reallocating existing demand.  Answering that requires cross-channel measurement, not isolated dashboards. 

Internal language and buying are shifting toward a unified commerce media view. In this model, the partnership channel is increasingly being evaluated as a connective layer across upper-funnel creators, retail media, and lower-funnel conversion incentives. 

From Parallel Channels to One Growth Engine 

This is where retail media and partnerships stop operating in parallel and start working as a system. 

The opportunity is not simply to add partnerships to retail media plans, but to integrate the two into a unified growth model. 

Key opportunities include: 

• Extend retail media beyond the retailer. Use affiliates, creators, and commerce content to drive incremental demand that retail media then captures on-platform, closing the loop with retailer measurement. 

• Align around shared incrementality goals. Bring retail media networks and partners together around metrics like new-to-brand acquisition, basket lift, and halo impact, rather than competing attribution claims. 

• Use creators as the front door. Supply attributable upper-funnel demand to retail media ecosystems through performance-focused creator programs. 

• Turn campaigns into always-optimizing engines. Pair campaign-based retail media with always-on partnership discovery and conversion surfaces to smooth the peaks and valleys of campaign flighting. 

Even a modest reallocation of retail media budgets into partnerships, just 5 to 10 percent of a roughly $110 billion market, represents a meaningful new investment pool. The opportunity now is not simply to shift spend, but to redesign how retail media and partnerships work together to drive incremental, measurable growth across the full funnel.