For years, retail media was treated as a glorified digital endcap: a sponsored search slot placed just before purchase. That definition is already too small. WARC forecasts global retail media spending at $196.7 billion in 2026, and says 47% of agency-side buyers now regard it as either a full-funnel or upper-funnel opportunity. In April 2026, the IAB argued that the next phase of commerce media will depend on connecting media investments to measurable business outcomes across both digital and physical channels. (warc.com)
What makes this shift especially interesting is the arrival of creators. According to the IAB, U.S. creator ad spend is projected to reach $37 billion in 2025, up 26% year on year, and sales now rank among the main goals of creator campaigns. That matters because creators offer what purchase data alone cannot: tone, taste, and credibility. Data can identify a likely buyer; a creator can turn that probability into desire. That is why the fusion of retail media and creator marketing looks less like a passing trend than a structural change in how persuasion works online. (iab.com)
The convergence is no longer theoretical. On October 7, 2025, Instacart announced what it called the first end-to-end retail media solution on TikTok, integrating its purchase and grocery-selection data directly into TikTok Ads Manager so brands can target high-intent audiences, connect users to product pages, and monitor daily conversion results through closed-loop measurement. Walmart is moving along a similar path: at its 2025 investor meeting, the company said Walmart Creator attracts higher-frequency customers who purchase at twice the rate of its overall digital benchmark, while Sam’s Club MAP said it would launch influencer- and creator-led content combined with first-party data for online and in-club campaigns. (investors.instacart.com)
Still, ambition is not the same as maturity. IAB Europe reports that fragmentation and lack of standardization remain the biggest barriers to retail media growth, and the IAB’s 2026 framework likewise stresses consistency, transparency, and proof of incremental impact. In other words, retail media can move beyond the “selling floor,” but only if it stops behaving like isolated ad inventory and starts operating as a coherent media-and-commerce system. The likely winners will be the players that combine transaction data with creator-led storytelling so seamlessly that advertising begins to feel like recommendation. (iabeurope.eu)










