LONDON – Retail media is entering a new phase, shifting from a narrow focus on placements and proximity to purchase toward a broader, intelligence-driven role across the full marketing funnel, said Samantha Bukowski, global head of commerce at WPP Media.
Speaking with Beet.TV contributor Robert Andrews at the Beet.TV and WPP Media Global Leadership Summit, Bukowski said the industry is finally moving past a supply-centric view of retail media, which once was focused on where ads appeared, to one rooted in data, intelligence and scale.
Her comments came as WPP Media’s big This Year Next Year (TYNY) Global End-of-Year advertising report predicted 2025 will be the first year where global commerce ad revenue surpasses total TV ad revenue – a symbolic and structural turning point.
Changing of the guard
According to TYNY: “Commerce is projected to reach $178.2 billion in global ad revenue in 2025, surpassing total TV ad revenue for the first time.” WPP Media forecasts global retail media revenue will rise 11.3% in 2025. That forecast is consistent with recent numbers from WARC and Forrester.
By comparison, combined traditional and streaming TV ad spending is expected to rise just 0.6%.
Meanwhile, WPP Media has lifted its outlook for ad spending globally:
- 2025: Global ad revenue will hit $1.14 trillion, +8.8% – up from the previous estimate of 6%.
- 2026: Global growth forecast: +7.1%, and growing at 6.3% CAGR over the next five years.
- New categories added: gaming, financial services media networks, travel media networks.
- Content-driven advertising still largest: $663.5 billion in 2025 (58% share).
- Gaming fastest-growing (+29.5% but still small).
“We’ve always known the power of retail media has been in the data and in the intelligence,” Bukowski said. “It’s just been challenging to apply that intelligence at scale.”
She said the question for advertisers and media planners is no longer whether retail media runs on-site or off-site, but “where in the holistic media plan can I apply that retailer’s intelligence?”
No single blueprint for ‘best-in-class’ retail media
As retail media grows, it is no longer just about the large retail players. As they do so, Bukowski said there is no one-size-fits-all model for success. Instead, retailers must lean into what makes their own data and inventory distinctive.
“You have someone like an Amazon and the enormity of their global footprint and their unique supply,” she said. “And then we have regional mid- and long-tail grocers and then we have specialty retailers and beauty, and all of these guys bring something specific and unique to the table.”
Trying to mirror another retailer’s media strategy rarely makes sense, Bukowski added.
“So I think ‘best-in-class’ is knowing what’s your unique point of difference that you’re bringing to the market,” she said.
She noted that retailers are increasingly realizing they don’t all need to invest heavily in massive technology stacks or large in-house media teams to be effective, as long as their intelligence can be delivered efficiently to advertisers.
Breaking down the wall between brand, performance
Retail media, once treated largely as a lower-funnel performance channel, is increasingly being deployed to support brand-building and upper-funnel reach.
“I am so thrilled that now finally in 2025, going into 2026, that we’ve started to kind of put aside the conversation around these like hard lines between what is considered brand building and what is considered performance,” Bukowski said.
Retail media can drive brand equity and salience just as effectively as other channels, she added, because of the depth of intelligence available to advertisers.
‘Gold mine’ for more brands
Retail media adoption is also widening beyond consumer packaged goods. Bukowski said non-endemic brands, or those without a direct sales or trade relationship with retailers, are increasingly using retail data to inform modeling and planning.
“I think the non-endemic brands are starting to recognize that retail data is a gold mine when it comes to building predictive engines, right, for how people behave in general,” she said.
That shift is driving greater use of retail data to understand emerging trends, consumer motivations and lifetime value, Bukowski added.
AI and LLMs drive next commerce shift
Looking ahead to 2026, Bukowski expects artificial intelligence to have the biggest impact on commerce and retail media. AI is forcing brands to rethink how paid, owned and earned media work together as discovery increasingly shifts toward large language models.
“For brands thinking about how they’re showing up in a large language model, right, like a ChatGPT or a Perplexity or a DeepSeek, they now have to think about their content, their operations, their D2C properties, their visibility on retail networks, their paid activity, their owned activity, their earned activity all at once,” she said, “to understand what the culmination of those things is that’s adding up to a total discoverability or even a total search kind of proposition for their brand.”
As consumer behavior evolves, retailers will also need to rethink how they monetize media networks as traffic shifts to AI-driven interfaces. While early integrations including experiments between platforms such as OpenAI and Shopify are already under way, Bukowski cautioned that everyday consumer adoption often lags industry expectations.
Still, she said the long-term trend is positive.
“I think it’s all very positive because, at the end of the day, it’s driving a better consumer experience, which is what makes these things sticky,” Bukowski said. “But as consumers start to shift the way that they discover and they shop, we’re gonna have to kind of follow suit.”
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You’re watching coverage from Beet.TV’s Global Leadership Summit with WPP Media, filmed in London, presented by Criteo, Index Exchange, Seedtag & The Trade Desk. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
