For years, retail media networks enjoyed a relatively effortless revenue boom, riding the e-commerce wave and leaning on supplier budgets that seemed inexhaustible. That era, according to one close industry observer, is over – and what comes next will separate the serious media businesses from the rest.
The sector is hardly collapsing. Global retail media spending is projected to climb from $184 billion in 2025 to $312 billion by 2030, according to Forrester, a compound annual growth rate of 11%. But growth projections mask a more complicated reality on the ground.
“The easy money is gone,” said Andrew Lipsman, an independent analyst and consultant specializing in media, advertising, and commerce, in this video interview with Beet.TV at CES 2026. “Retailers are learning that they can’t just have money flooding in because of the rise of e-commerce, and they can’t continue to lean on their suppliers to spend more on retail media. They’re saying they’re tapped out.”
Acting like a real media company
In Lipsman diagnosis, retail media networks must now compete for national advertiser budgets that have historically flowed to the likes of Meta and Google. That’s a legitimate opportunity, he argued, but one that demands a different skill set and better execution than most networks have demonstrated so far.
“They got to start acting like real media companies if they want those national advertiser budgets,” he said. “I think they have a great claim to it, but it’s going to take a different skill set, better execution, and acting more like a media company.”
That ambition is increasingly playing out in the shift to offsite channels – particularly connected TV and social. Amazon, whose DSP now plugs into roughly half of the premium CTV market through partnerships with Roku, Disney Advertising, Spotify, and others, is the most advanced example of this trajectory. Walmart’s acquisition of Vizio has given it a comparable on-ramp into living-room screens.
Caught in a ROAS trap
The offsite expansion, however, is running headlong into a measurement problem that Lipsman described as a “ROAS trap.” Advertisers accustomed to performance metrics are being asked to pay a data premium for upper-funnel CTV inventory – and the math doesn’t always look flattering when expressed in traditional return-on-ad-spend terms.
“The resistance you get from advertisers is, ‘Why am I buying from you, retail media network, when I can just go and buy the same audiences directly?'” Lipsman said. “Now, they can’t necessarily get the same audiences directly, but they think they can. And when the CPMs are high, ROAS doesn’t look as good.”
His proposed remedy is a shift toward incremental ROAS — iROAS — a metric that attempts to isolate the genuine lift attributable to a campaign rather than capturing conversions that would have happened anyway.
Consolidation, crumbs, and regional grocers
On the question of market structure, Lipsman pushed back against the conventional wisdom that retail media is essentially a two-player game. Yes, Amazon and Walmart dominate – eMarketer forecasts the two will capture more than 89% of incremental U.S. retail media spending growth between 2025 and 2026 – but that framing obscures a more varied landscape beneath the surface.
Lipsman remains excited by the potential of performance TV for retail media.
“(That means) narrower targeting and closed loop attribution,” he said. “This is a major innovation. It’s one of those things that’s been inevitable, but the time is now because Amazon is plugged into so much of the premium inventory, about 50% of the CTV market, they can plug into now. So that’s huge.
”Now we also have Walmart and Vizio getting real. So this is the moment and CMOs aren’t going to be able to ignore it anymore.”
