Good morning from Retail Media Age HQ,
The industry is finding plenty to talk about this week with the release of the autumn budget and the latest figures from AA/WARC coming one after the other.
Since I’m not much of a politics or economics head, I’ll stick to the one I feel slightly more confident in commenting on – namely the AA/WARC figures, which as expected, have some interesting nuggets to reflect on regarding retail media.
Despite increasing talk of retail media’s ‘gangly teenager’ phase as the channel moves away from a pure growth story into something more nuanced, there is still a growth story here.
The narrative for advertising overall is a positive one, first off, with UK ad investment reported to have risen by 11% year-on-year in Q2 2026 – and with ad spend forecast to reach a record £14bn during the upcoming festive period, up by £1.06bn on 2025.
Now to retail media: in Q2 2026, retail media commanded 8.4% of ad investment – representing 31.2% year-on-year growth. As pointed out by Niamh Carroll in Marketing Week, this means that retail media represented roughly £1 of every £12 spent on advertising last quarter. That’s a pretty big deal.
It’s worth remembering that the AA/WARC report for Q4 2025, released in May, marked only the first time that retail media had been broken out as a standalone channel, along with social media.
Retail media’s growth beat social this past quarter (at 31.2% to social media’s 22.2%), though social is due to overtake it even in the key festive period, with 18.5% growth forecast to retail media’s 16.2%. Still, it will be interesting to see whether those forecasts match the actual figures once the quarter is past.
As for full-year 2026 figures, retail media is projected to lead the pack here as well, with predicted growth of 23%, ahead of social media’s 20.7% and addressable TV’s 14.7%.
A good amount of this growth opportunity may be coming from what often gets called ‘commerce media’: the wider world of not-strictly-retail, from ads on travel and transport providers to payment platforms and quick-service restaurants. From IAB UK’s Denise Breslin explaining why the organisation has shifted to using ‘commerce media’ to Epsilon’s James Milne writing about retail media growing beyond retail, we’ve had a fair bit of commentary on this in the pages of RMA.
I’m of the opinion that it doesn’t too much matter what you call it, but regardless, it’s exciting to witness more and more sectors realising the potential of using their owned data to serve ads that are truly relevant to customers – and at all stages of the funnel.
There’s also a lot of promising movement within the industry to set down standards that can counteract some of the pains that accompany this growth – i.e., fragmentation.
Now, attention is shifting towards the big ‘I’ that promises to demonstrate what established and new players alike are getting for their spend: incrementality. It’s no coincidence that when I spoke with Art Valkenburg, Group Vice President Media & Digital Transformation at Carlsberg Group, in Copenhagen last week, he told me that the brand is doubling down on incrementality and understanding how that plays out across the full funnel, regardless of the channel or touchpoint.
Retail media’s growth story looks set to continue for the next while, but even if it slows, the core task will remain the same: understanding how retail media is truly contributing to sales and brand growth, which is the missing puzzle piece in demonstrating what all that investment has really led to.
Read more viewpoints from Retail Media Age’s editorial staff and expert commentators in our RMA columns.
