The commerce media landscape is bracing for a defining year. Pressure is building across retailers and platforms to rethink how shoppers discover, evaluate, and buy products.

“What stands out to us about 2026 is that the shifts we’re anticipating center around bringing commerce media back to the core mechanics of shopping in retail media,” said our analyst Sarah Marzano during the keynote session at EMARKETER’s Virtual Summit last week.

As commerce media players race to integrate media, merchandising, and physical shopping, the goal is to create more coherent experiences and monetizable moments across the buyer journey.

Here are the key forces shaping the industry in the coming year.

1. Retailers are reorganizing for a new era of retail media

Retail media networks (RMNs) have matured quickly, but their internal structures haven’t kept pace.

• Many RMNs grew up “structurally disconnected from merchandising, marketing and store operations,” said Marzano.
• That made sense during early growth, but “now… those gaps are actually hindering growth.”

Retailers must rethink fundamental questions, including where retail media should sit within the organization, how to better align merchandising, digital, and in-store media teams around shared outcomes, and who should own the decisions that influence both media performance and core retail results.

That’s why 2026 will be “a year of organizational evolution,” according to our analyst Max Willens, with retailers elevating retail media internally, restructuring reporting lines, and “aligning incentives in a way that accelerates broader retail goals.”

2. Agentic AI shopping environments are reshaping discovery and monetization

“Broad monetization of AI shopping agents [is] starting to look a lot more likely,” said Marzano. Consumers are adopting platform-owned agents quickly, and retailers are “putting real money into building their own proprietary assistants.”

But the implications go deeper than new ad formats. They challenge the foundation of retail media revenue.

• Sponsored search drives over 60% of US retail media spend today, but it hinges on people using the search function on retailer websites.
• If shoppers instead research through conversational agents, “the value of those search ads will start to erode,” said Marzano.

Retailers are aware of this threat, with Gen AI search and agentic AI identified as the most disruptive developments over the next three years, according to an October report from EMARKETER and Bain & Company.

But there’s potential upside.

“Agentic interactions could give you a much, much richer kind of context, way more than any click or keyword ever can,” said Willens.

3. In-store retail media enters its showcase era

Despite most sales occurring in physical stores, digital in-store media represents less than 1% of all retail media ad spend in the US, according to EMARKETER’s forecast.

Up until now, retailers have been cautious, needing to validate value before investing in scale. But that’s changing.

• Retailers are shifting from “quiet controlled testing approaches to a high visibility in-store showcase environment,” said Willens.
• These will take the form of immersive store takeovers designed to demonstrate what mature in-store media can deliver.

Retailers are also expanding the definition of in-store. New activations will incorporate “exterior facades, entry zones, and parking lot media,” said Marzano, creating “total store activation, turnkey high impact packages” that increase visibility while simplifying execution for brands.

4. Financial media networks move closer to the point of purchase

Financial media networks (FMNs) have access to “expansive cross-merchant purchase history,” Marzano noted, but they don’t own the environments where people browse, compare, or check out.” As a result, they have struggled to capture meaningful commerce budgets.

Growth is slowing, and unless something shifts, FMNs will remain under 2% of US commerce media spending through 2027.

• FMNs must evolve “from places where spending is tracked into places where spending actually happens,” said Marzano.
• PayPal and buy now pay later (BNPL) platforms hint at this future, as they are increasingly used as shopping gateways rather than just financing tools.

To close the gap, FMNs may accelerate acquisitions or integrations with ecommerce aggregators, reward platforms, BNPL players, or other surfaces that bring them closer to discovery and consideration moments.

• This would create “an entirely new kind of commerce environment,” built on financial data, high intent moments, and closed loop measurement, according to Willens.
• He also sees opportunities for creators. “Curated storefronts, deal content, even embedded recommendations… could wind up being an amazing prototype that everybody follows.”

Watch the full session.

This article was prepared with the assistance of generative AI tools to support content organization, summarization, and drafting. All AI-generated contributions have been reviewed, fact-checked, and verified for accuracy and originality by EMARKETER editors. Any recommendations reflect EMARKETER’s research and human judgment.

This was originally featured in the Commerce Media Weekly newsletter. For more marketing insights, statistics, and trends, subscribe here.