Sean Crawford, Managing Director, North America at SMG
Retail media is growing, but the opportunity is becoming increasingly concentrated. According to industry tracker Mimbi, more than 250 retail media networks now operate globally, while Emarketer forecasts that U.S. retail media spending will reach $72 billion in 2026.
Yet Amazon is expected to account for nearly 80% of that market and Walmart roughly 9%. Together, they are forecast to capture 89% of retail media spending this year.
This concentration makes collaboration a commercial priority. As commerce media matures, success will depend less on what individual organizations can build on their own and more on how retailers, brands, agencies, publishers, and technology partners combine their data, expertise, investment, and customer relationships to create value they could not deliver independently.
Bringing effective partnerships to life
This represents a shift from bilateral partnerships toward a broader model of collaboration. A retailer working directly with a brand or technology provider may solve a specific need. An ecosystem connects several participants around a shared commercial objective, allowing them to extend their reach, develop new capabilities, and create more value together.
There is no single way to build that ecosystem. Joint business planning, for instance, is most effective when a retailer and brand share long-term growth priorities and want to connect media investment with broader commercial goals. Shared measurement becomes important when partners need a consistent understanding of performance.
Data partnerships can reveal insights that one organization could not generate alone, provided ownership, consent, and usage are clearly defined. Co-investment can help partners develop new formats, technology, or measurement capabilities when the cost or risk would be too high for one business to carry independently.
Whatever form it takes, however, collaboration does not happen by default.
Retailers want to protect their customer relationships, data, inventory, and differentiation. Brands want access, transparency, and measurable results. Agencies need efficient ways to manage investment across partners. Publishers want to preserve the value of their audiences and content, while technology providers must deliver scale without adding unnecessary complexity.
These priorities can create tension around ownership, control, investment, and accountability. Trust can quickly break down when responsibilities are unclear or when one participant believes another is capturing a disproportionate share of the value.
Overcoming the hurdles to a successful collaboration
Successful ecosystems address these tensions from the beginning. They establish a shared objective, define what each participant contributes, agree on how decisions will be made, and create transparency around performance and value. Incentives must support the collective goal rather than encourage individual teams to protect their own budgets or relationships.
This does not mean every participant must become interchangeable. Retailers should continue to control their inventory, pricing, data, customer relationships, and commercial strategies. The purpose of an ecosystem is not to remove differentiation. It is to make those individual strengths easier to combine, access, and scale.
Putting these principles into practice also requires the industry to reduce the friction that prevents participants from working together. Common standards, interoperable systems, and consistent processes can make opportunities across multiple retailers easier for brands and agencies to discover, plan, buy, and measure.
Done well, this model can give retailers additional routes to market while allowing each business to retain control of its proposition, inventory, data, pricing, and commercial relationships. It can also help partners combine complementary audiences and media environments to create propositions that would be difficult for any one network to offer independently.
How retail media networks can compete against the titans
The implications are significant. A stronger ecosystem gives RMNs of all sizes a more credible way to compete for advertiser investment that is currently concentrated among Amazon, Walmart, and a small group of scaled networks.
Brands and agencies will continue to favour the partners that are easiest to access; so without greater interoperability and simpler routes to market, valuable RMNs may be overlooked entirely.
Collaboration should therefore be viewed as a strategic capability. Organizations that can align incentives, build trust, and connect their strengths will be better positioned to innovate, scale, and generate sustainable growth.
The industry has proven it can build retail media networks. The next challenge is turning them into an ecosystem that can grow together.
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