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At NRF 2026: Retail’s Big Show, retail media advertising wasn’t just a side conversation, it was a headline topic. Experts made it clear that retail media networks (RMNs) are maturing into core revenue and customer engagement engines for retailers large and small, and U.S. retail media is projected to hit critical mass in 2026, with continued momentum and scaling opportunities.

We’ve been keeping an eye on the rise of retail media advertising for a few years now, but not even we could have predicted just how much the industry would grow in such a short period of time. Retailers are increasingly viewing RMNs as strategic growth levers, not just digital display portfolios. Beyond traditional product margins, RMNs now contribute meaningful top-line revenue, and retailers’ rich customer data gives RMNs unique targeting and attribution capabilities versus traditional digital advertising. 

Everyone is jumping in at the same time because they see huge potential for growth, but most of these organizations don’t have a traditional background in selling advertising. Here are the main insights our retail media experts took away from NRF 2026, from key challenges to the technology that is helping retailers evolve past early adoption.   

Investing in technology that will help scale business

Many of the companies we engaged with at NRF are still relatively new in the retail media arena, and the ones that are doing things right are investing in tools that help them scale their business. I commonly see a lot of retailers either trying to bastardize existing software or create their own applications because they’re just getting into ad sales, so they don’t know exactly where they should invest. Do they need an order management system? Should they have a real CRM that’s tailored to media? The ones that are doing well recognize the need to get these systems up and running.

From a CRM perspective, they’re looking at things like Salesforce and Agentforce Media (formerly Salesforce Media Cloud). The replatforming of Agentforce Media on the core Salesforce platform makes managing retail media networks smoother, faster, and more stable, providing organizations with a product that aligns with regular Salesforce releases rather than requiring them to implement the previous managed package.

One of our clients was dealing with a legacy Salesforce instance that was not equipped to deal with the ever-changing retail media advertising business. Systems were siloed, data was stale, and sellers were operating in a reactive capacity instead of proactively selling to agency and advertiser partners. The process was also legacy, and not reflective of the current objectives of sales, marketing, operations, and finance teams.

The Salesforce and Mphasis Silverline teams presented a new vision for how the company can execute against their growth objectives with a connected platform that includes a suite of Salesforce products, connected with both middle- and back-office systems. The overall solution puts information at the hands of the seller, and empowers them to have better conversations with their agency and advertiser partners.

Incorporating AI across processes

Every company wants to know how they can incorporate AI into their processes. AI was everywhere at NRF, and its benefits for retail media were clear:

  • Audience segmentation and optimization: AI makes it possible to analyze first-party data more deeply and personalize ad delivery at scale.
  • Real-time campaign adjustment: Machine learning enables real-time media performance optimization and contextual ad delivery, increasing ROI and relevance for brands.
  • Creative experimentation: Some platforms showcase AI-assisted creative formats, like shoppable media and dynamic recommendations, that blur lines between advertising and commerce.

A big trend we’re seeing in retail media is the concept of using generative AI to build proposals based off of RFPs that are being sent by agencies and various advertising clients. Let’s say there’s an agency issuing an RFP for a big campaign, and they’re sending it out to a bunch of retailers. They’ll submit the RFP, and there’s an AI opportunity to take that document in any format (PDF, Excel doc, etc.) and feed it into an AI engine that can analyze it and provide a salesperson with recommendations on things like different potential ad products to position to best satisfy the KPIs of that RFP. 

Increased investment in the in-store experience

There’s been a large focus on digital-related media opportunities on retailers’ websites and apps, but nearly every retail media network is also investing more heavily in their in-store channel. That means developing an infrastructure to build out the actual stands, booths, and TV screens that they put into their store, as well as implementing technology that allows them to track the impact that these in-store displays have on the customer’s purchase decision. 

At NRF, we saw some really interesting technology transforming the in-store buyer experience, like Instacart’s Caper Carts, which feature self-contained checkout kiaskos within the shopping cart. From a retail media perspective, this offers a huge opportunity to present specific ads directly in front of the customer depending on where they are in the store. 

Finding growth opportunities through “coopetition”

Another interesting thing we saw come up at NRF was retailers partnering with other ad marketplaces to free up portions of their inventory. Macy’s did a presentation about how now you can buy ad space on Macys.com and their e-commerce site through Amazon ads. They’re using Amazon ads as a traditional DSP where they’re freeing up some of their inventory to be sold through through those means. 

There’s a lot to talk about the benefits of “coopetition” and how technically those are ad dollars that retailers would generally just want to capture all directly themselves. Why split the cash with Amazon? Because they are seeing it as something that is helping them grow and they are getting decent returns out of that. We’ll probably see more and more of that as time goes on. 

Gaining a better understanding of campaign funding

At the beginning of a retailer’s fiscal year, retailers reach out to all their vendors and pre-secure commitments for advertising spend. They sell products on their shelves, so they need to commit to spending. If the spend is a million dollars, that can be broken down in various ways: this much for a particular type of ad campaign, this much for your in-store campaigns, this much for overarching brand-led campaigns. 

Let’s look at the common example of back-to-school campaigns. A business is having a big back-to-school campaign and they want Samsung, Microsoft, and Apple to participate. At the start of the year, they go through the process of negotiating what those initial commitments will be. No one’s actually bought anything yet, but they’re committing to fill an account with funds that will then get drawn from throughout the year as people actually buy campaigns. 

Our Retail Media Campaign Funding Accelerator manages the process of tracking all of that funding throughout the year. As sellers are building campaigns, they can see where they have funding available to be spent, where people are pacing well against their commitment, and where they’re not pacing well against their commitment. They can then either suggest new campaigns, changes to campaigns, different product mixes, or different types of campaigns based on the funding that the client has available. The accelerator manages the allocation of funds to various ad campaigns, all within Salesforce. 

Register for our upcoming webinar to learn more about building a retail media network.