What's Shaping the Future of In-Store Retail Media in 2026

Last updated: August 2026. Reviewed by Kunal Damgude, Growth and Product Marketing Manager.

Six forces are shaping in-store retail media through 2027: screen networks moving from pilot to chain-wide scale, place-and-time intelligence (which store, which day, which hour) becoming the planning layer, analog and digital inventory merging into a single in-store offer, retailer-built custom formats commanding premium rates, AI taking over campaign operations so tail and torso advertisers become economic to serve, and measurement moving from foot-traffic proxies toward store-level sales lift. US in-store retail media ad spending is forecast to climb 33.1% in 2026 from a base that is still under 1% of total retail media spend, so each of these forces is a budget decision a retail media leader takes this year, not a distant forecast. Osmos carries in-store next to onsite and offsite, priced per store, per day and per campaign.

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The parent overview of how retail media grew from onsite search into a full media business across channels is the retail media evolution guide. The present-tense in-store playbook, what the inventory is, how it is priced per store and per day, and how a campaign gets booked, is documented in how retailers monetize in-store traffic. The forces below are the next chapter: developments already visible in named 2026 deployments that decide where in-store budget, hardware and headcount go through 2027.

Where in-store retail media stands in 2026

In-store retail media is advertising inventory inside a physical store, digital screens and analog surfaces alike, that a retailer packages and offers to brands, measured against store traffic and store sales.

The gap between where shoppers are and where retail media money goes is the whole story. More than 80% of US retail sales still take place in physical stores, and more than 91% of food and beverage sales do, per eMarketer's June 2026 FAQ on in-store retail media. Against that, in-store amounted to just 3.3% of remaining retail media spend in 2025 (the spend outside Amazon and Walmart), and digital in-store stays under 1% of the total US retail media pool. The growth rate is what moved: eMarketer forecast in January 2026 that US in-store retail media ad spending would climb 33.1% during the year.

The total pool sets the context. eMarketer's December 2025 forecast put 2026 US retail media ad spending at $71.09 billion, up 17.8% from $60.32 billion in 2025. Its mid-2026 update revised the 2026 total upward to $72.97 billion at 20.3% year over year growth, a later vintage of the same forecast family rather than a contradiction of it. Inside that pool, Amazon and Walmart account for 88.2% of US retail media digital ad spending in 2026. For every other retailer, the differentiated inventory is not another sponsored product slot. It is the store.

Demand is already ahead of supply. 70% of grocery retailers said they planned to deploy in-store retail media within 18 months, per eMarketer, and a March 2025 Koddi survey reported by eMarketer in January 2026 found 26% of retail media advertisers and agencies naming reach into in-store customers as a top challenge, with 31% naming lack of measurement or proof of return as the second-highest pain point.

The reason supply lags is cost and coordination, not appetite. eMarketer names the technology, hardware and operational overhaul needed to scale in-store programs as a massive barrier. Sarah Marzano, an EMARKETER analyst, put the execution problem plainly: "Moving into physical stores is harder, it's more expensive, it slows execution, it requires a lot more coordination from cross-functional teams."

Two structural facts about in-store carry forward into every trend below. Pricing is anchored to store count and duration rather than impressions, because most estates lack the sensor coverage a real impression count needs. Targeting axes are place and time, which store list, which day, which hour, never the identity of the shopper in the aisle. Grocery and quick-commerce are the fastest-moving verticals here, and the sector-by-sector picture is in the retail media by sector deep dives.

Trend 1: In-store screen networks scale from pilot to chain-wide

The 2026 screen announcements are not pilots. CVS Health entered 2026 with roughly 500 front-entrance screens, 2,000 pharmacy waiting-area screens, more than 600 digital end-caps and 7,200 in-store audio locations. Its stated 2026 goal, reported by Modern Retail, is roughly 11,000 total digital screens nationwide, checkout-ad point-of-sale systems in about 7,000 stores, and front-entrance screens doubling from 500 to 1,000. CVS said 54% of shoppers find in-store screens useful and 20% take action after viewing one. Parbinder Dhariwal, VP and GM of CVS Media Exchange, framed the reason: "We communicate with our consumers in the digital channel, but we also need to ensure that we can capture mindshare."

The same report puts Kroger's Barrows Connected Stores platform into a nationwide 2026 expansion, Hy-Vee at more than 10,000 screens across 400-plus locations, Grocery TV running across 6,500 stores at 120-plus retailers, and Best Buy launching advertiser takeover packages. Albertsons Media Collective is the sharpest curve: invidis reported in January 2026 a tenfold expansion to 800 stores with digital screens in 2026, up from an 80-store pilot launched in summer 2025, inside an estate of more than 2,200 locations, with more than 50 advertisers signed during the pilot.

Smart carts are a parallel supply line. Instacart announced on 3 August 2026 that its more than 7,000 brand partners now have access to in-store advertising on Caper Carts, available at grocery stores across more than 60 US cities and named banners including ALDI, Kroger, Schnucks and Wakefern.

Marlow Nickell, co-founder and CEO of GroceryTV, described what the buildout changes: "Most purchase decisions still happen in the store, and the scale to influence those moments has grown significantly."

What does programmatic in-store retail media actually mean in 2026?

Digital out of home (DOOH) buying habits are pushing brands to expect programmatic access to store screens, but in-store is not a clean open exchange, and no verified 2026 source shows it behaving like one. What is documented is real-time optimisation against sensor input inside a direct-booked campaign. Albertsons runs its network with technology partner Stratacache using Walkbase sensors for impression tracking and real-time campaign optimisation. Walmart Connect Mexico's Advertima Audience AI rollout lists real-time audience targeting on digital in-store media booked through direct insertion orders as one of its three initial use cases.

The practical read for a retailer: build for reliable scheduling, daypart control and verified play-out first, and treat programmatic pipes as a demand-access layer to add once the store network is stable and measured. The operational build, screen placement, zone strategy, content ops and play-out logging, is covered in the in-store digital screens guide.

Trend 2: Place-and-time intelligence replaces person-level targeting

Place-and-time targeting is the practice of deciding which stores, which days and which hours a campaign runs, using aggregate store traffic and basket data, without identifying any individual shopper.

Vendor language in the market runs ahead of deployed reality here, and the gap matters for anyone budgeting hardware. Adam Skinner, Managing Director of Unified Retail Media at Epsilon, told eMarketer in January 2026: "In the coming year, retailers are doubling down on first-party identity and real-time audience solutions to deliver person-based, cross-channel engagement and dynamic ad decisioning tied to margin and inventory." That is one named executive's stated ambition for the year ahead.

Set it against the largest in-store audience intelligence deployment anyone announced in 2026. Advertima's rollout with Walmart Connect Mexico spans hundreds of Walmart Supercenters and thousands of sensors, and the company is explicit that the system "does not identify individuals, and generates anonymous audience segments without storing imagery." Its own description of the capability is aggregate by design: "Advertima's Audience AI translates always-anonymous physical shopper presence into real-time, addressable audience segments." The most advanced deployment on the board resolves to segments, dayparts and store zones. Not to a person walking past a screen.

That is the trajectory to plan against: which of your 900 stores over-index for young families on Saturday mornings, which endcap zone converts a beverage promotion at 5pm, which 120-store cluster justifies a premium rate for a two-week window. Person-level dynamic ad swapping in aisle is technically possible and does not happen at scale; treat any roadmap that depends on it as experimental.

The gating factor is hardware. Sensor-based measurement is confined to leading-edge estates with named technology partners, Albertsons with Stratacache and Walkbase, Walmart Connect Mexico with Advertima. If your stores do not have sensors, impression-based pricing is not available to you, and pretending otherwise costs you an advertiser relationship the first time a brand audits delivery.

How does first-party shopper data fit into in-store targeting?

Loyalty and basket data is what turns a store list into an audience proposition. It answers which stores skew to which categories, which dayparts carry which baskets, and which regional cluster is worth a premium, all at aggregate level and all defensible under privacy review. Retailer apps are already part of the in-store moment: 43.2% of US mobile shopping app buyers say they use a brand or retailer's app in-store to access discounts, coupons or promotions, per Bizrate Insights and EMARKETER data cited in eMarketer's January 2026 piece.

The general story of turning shopper data into revenue, including permissions, clean-room patterns and packaging, is in how retailers monetize first-party data, and the targeting mechanics across channels are in AI-driven targeting in retail media. The in-store-specific future slice is narrower and more useful: your first-party data's highest-value job in store is choosing the store list and the clock, then proving what happened at the till.

Trend 3: Analog and digital converge into one in-store offer

Most retailers still run their store media as separate businesses, and buyers feel it. Per eMarketer, 86% of grocers say their print circulars, digital media networks and in-store media networks remain completely siloed or only partially integrated. Sarah Marzano of EMARKETER traced the cause: "Most retail media networks were built really quickly and in silos, which made sense at the start when the focus was purely on ecommerce."

The correction underway is a single in-store offer. Shelf talkers, print, endcap takeovers, floor graphics and sampling belong on the same rate card and the same insertion order as the screens, priced the same way, per store, per day, per campaign, and reported in one place. That is how Osmos structures in-store retail media: analog surfaces and digital screens together as one inventory set, so a brand books a chain-wide presence in a named store cluster for a named window rather than negotiating three separate programmes with three separate teams.

Common vocabulary is arriving to support this. The IAB and IAB Europe released joint in-store retail media standards on 3 December 2024 after a two-month public comment period, establishing unified definitions, measurement standards and guidelines for ad formats and store zones on top of the existing IAB and Media Rating Council retail media measurement guidelines. Buyers will increasingly ask for your inventory described in that vocabulary. Retailers that can answer with one catalogue across analog and digital will book bigger, longer campaigns than those that cannot.

Trend 4: Custom, high-impact formats built per retailer

The next wave of in-store revenue is not more of the same banner. It is differentiated formats a retailer designs for its own environment and prices at a premium, which is how a retail media network reaches awareness budgets rather than competing only for lower-funnel trade dollars. Kroger Precision Marketing has made that case publicly for the store as a brand building surface, and Best Buy's advertiser takeover packages are the same instinct expressed as inventory.

The constraint has always been build time. A retailer that needs an engineering cycle to launch a new format cannot respond to a brand brief inside a campaign window. With Osmos, a retailer creates its own differentiated ad format and goes live in about three hours, then prices it at a premium.

Translated into the store, the same mechanic is a named zone package: an entrance screen plus an endcap plus shelf-level analog in a defined store cluster for a defined daypart, built as one bookable format. Format taxonomy across channels, including where each format belongs in the funnel, is set out in retail media ads and sponsored formats.

Trend 5: AI takes over campaign operations and activates the tail

AI's centre of gravity in retail media is moving from making creative to running campaigns. A Skai and Stratably survey of retail media marketers found 63% currently deploy generative AI in retail media, with 52% using it primarily for creative and content production today, and projected the 2026 mix shifting toward campaign management at 42%, analytics at 42% and personalization at 36%. The same report notes the sophisticated end of the market is "building systematic capabilities with clear use cases and operational integration."

For a retailer, the revenue consequence is about the tail. Most in-store demand beyond the top 30 brands never activates, because the cost of an Ad Ops person to plan, launch and optimise a 40-store, two-week campaign exceeds the campaign. Osmos's Sofie AI closes that gap: one-click campaign creation and AI-assisted optimisation that recommends stores, time of the day, day of the week, budgets, ad format, which lowers Ad Ops cost per advertiser and makes a long tail of regional and mid-size brands economic to serve. That is the difference between an in-store network with 50 advertisers and one with 500.

AI is also changing what the shopper does in the aisle, which changes what the inventory is worth. David McIntosh, Chief Connected Stores Officer at Instacart, described the near-term shape: "AI will make it easier to build weekly meal plans that fit a family's budget and dietary needs, help customers break out of their shopping autopilot by surfacing relevant new products and produce real-time reminders in-store so they don't miss anything on their list."

Trend 6: Measurement moves from proxies toward store-level sales lift

Measurement is the constraint on in-store rates, and the Koddi survey cited earlier puts it second on the buyer's list of complaints. Return on ad spend (ROAS) in a store is harder to evidence than a click, and the honest answer for most retailers in 2026 is store-level sales lift measured against control stores, not per-shopper attribution.

The reference points are getting concrete. Albertsons Media Collective calibrates its measurement framework against more than 60 factors, and reported a named campaign result: Mondelez and Sargento Cheese Bakes delivered a 14% sales lift in participating stores. Albertsons positions that infrastructure to advertisers as measurement reliable enough to plan budgets against. On the vendor side, Epsilon Retail Media has published in-store attribution metrics including a Halo Instore ROAS that measures a campaign's influence across a brand's full in-store product portfolio rather than only the advertised SKU, connecting onsite activity to point-of-sale data.

Three limits are worth stating to buyers before they ask. Without sensors you are reporting opportunity-to-see against store traffic, not verified exposure, and you should label it that way. Control-store design does the heavy lifting, so store matching and campaign duration matter more than dashboard sophistication. And the loop only closes where loyalty or point-of-sale data can be joined to the campaign window, which is a data-engineering commitment, not a feature toggle. The full methodology stack, including incrementality design and closed-loop patterns, is in the retail media attribution and measurement guide.

How in-store monetization models change from here

Pricing follows hardware, and that will not reverse quickly. Per-store, per-day and per-campaign pricing stays the default because store count and duration are what a retailer can guarantee and a brand can verify. Cost per thousand impressions (CPM) becomes credible only where sensor coverage exists to count exposure, which today means the leading-edge estates named in Trend 2. Two shifts are visible on top of that base: premium pricing for custom formats and named zone packages, and longer-duration commitments as measurement improves. The full taxonomy of monetization models and how to price each one is in the retail media network monetization and ROAS guide.

Non-endemic demand is the most over-promised part of the in-store future, so it is worth being precise. eMarketer's February 2026 FAQ on non-endemic retail media records that many retailers currently limit non-endemic ads to off-site environments or post-purchase placements to protect the shopping experience. In-store non-endemic inventory is emerging, not established. Treat it as a 2027 revenue line to test in low-risk zones, pharmacy waiting areas and checkout, rather than a 2026 forecast to underwrite.

Scale is what the biggest networks are buying with all of this. Walmart reported in June 2026 that Walmart Connect US reaches more than 150 million weekly customers, that global advertising revenue grew 37% year over year in the most recent quarter, and that Walmart Connect US grew 44% excluding VIZIO, with omnichannel activation across more than 10,000 stores and clubs globally. Seth Dallaire, Chief Growth Officer at Walmart Inc., set the frame: "The future of commerce media isn't about advertising in a single channel but understanding and serving customers and members wherever and however they choose to shop."

Mid-size retailers do not need Walmart's estate to move the number, and the revenue-ceiling arithmetic behind that sits in the retail media network monetization guide.

What to fund in the next two quarters

Frequently asked questions

What are the biggest retail media trends heading into 2027?

Six, and each has its own section above: chain-wide in-store screen buildouts, place-and-time intelligence replacing person-level ambitions, analog and digital in-store inventory converging onto one platform, retailer-built custom formats reaching awareness budgets, AI taking over campaign operations, and measurement shifting toward store-level sales lift.

What changed between 2025 and 2026 in retail media?

In-store moved from pilot to commitment. 2025 was the pilot year: Albertsons launched an 80-store digital display pilot in summer 2025 and CVS ended the year with about 500 front-entrance screens. 2026 is the scaling year, with those same pilots becoming tenfold and chain-wide expansions. The change that matters to a brand is that a store campaign can now be booked at a scale worth planning against.

What is the future of AI in retail media?

AI moves from producing creative to running campaign operations, which is what makes tail and torso advertisers economic to serve. Trend 5 above carries the survey data and what that shift does to a retailer's revenue.

What are the trends in onsite retail media ad formats?

Onsite is maturing away from undifferentiated sponsored listings toward retailer-specific high-impact placements that pull awareness budgets, homepage video, audio plus display against a category, category takeovers, and richer product-detail units. Speed of format creation is becoming the competitive variable, since a format that takes an engineering cycle cannot answer a live brief. The format-by-format breakdown across onsite, offsite and in-store is in retail media ads and sponsored formats.

Sources

1. eMarketer, FAQ on in-store retail media: Closing the gap between demand and execution (26 June 2026). https://www.emarketer.com/content/faq-on-in-store-retail-media--closing-gap-between-demand-execution
2. eMarketer, In-store experience becomes retail's pressure valve in 2026 (29 January 2026). https://www.emarketer.com/content/in-store-experience-becomes-retails-pressure-valve-2026
3. eMarketer, Why retailers aim to break down retail media silos in 2026 (27 January 2026). https://www.emarketer.com/content/why-retailers-aim-break-down-retail-media-silos-2026
4. eMarketer, FAQ on non-endemic retail media: Leaders, data uses, and what's new for 2026 (15 February 2026). https://www.emarketer.com/content/faq-on-non-endemic-retail-media--leaders--data-uses--what-s-new-2026
5. IAB and IAB Europe, In-Store Retail Media: Definitions and Measurement (3 December 2024). https://www.iab.com/guidelines/in-store-retail-media/
6. Modern Retail, Retailers like Kroger, CVS plan many more screens for in-store ads in 2026 (6 January 2026). https://www.modernretail.co/marketing/retailers-like-kroger-cvs-plan-many-more-screens-for-in-store-ads-in-2026/
7. invidis / sixteen-nine, Albertsons to Expand Retail Media Network 10x (21 January 2026). https://invidis.com/sixteen-nine/2026/01/21/albertsons-to-expand-retail-media-network-10x-accelerating-scale-for-advertisers/
8. Walmart Corporate, Walmart Sets the Vision for the Next Era of Global Commerce Media (22 June 2026). https://corporate.walmart.com/news/2026/06/22/walmart-sets-the-vision-for-the-next-era-of-global-commerce-media
9. Advertima, Walmart Connect Mexico Chooses Advertima Audience AI (9 January 2026). https://advertima.com/press/detail/walmart-connect-advertima-audienceai/
10. Instacart Investor Relations, Instacart Expands In-Store Advertising to All Brands on Caper Carts (3 August 2026). https://investors.instacart.com/news-releases/news-release-details/instacart-expands-store-advertising-all-brands-caper-carts
11. Epsilon, In-Store Sales Attribution: Closing the loop on retail media (9 March 2026). https://www.epsilon.com/emea/insights/blog/in-store-sales-attribution-closing-loop-retail-media
12. Skai with Stratably, The 2026 State of Retail Media (14 January 2026). https://skai.io/blog/the-2026-state-of-retail-media-building-the-foundation-for-ai-driven-commerce/