The US retail media sector is expected to grow by 17.2% from 2024 to 2028, with US advertisers expected to spend in excess of $62bn on retail media in 2025 – $10bn more than last year – and accounting for 35% of the $177.7bn total global spend on retail media predicted by WARC.
This is the prediction from a ‘cautious’ Emarketer report, which has downgraded its retail media growth forecast from 24% as it sees a slight tempering in spend. Lack of standardisation and measurement being the main drag, along with the increasing complexity and dilution of the market.

However, retail media still offers a way to fulfil two key, complementary needs that advertisers have, says Emarketer. One is a scaled, efficient environment for driving measurable sales. The other is deterministic, privacy-compliant data that can be used to target consumers who sit at the top or middle of the purchase funnel.
Consequently, most retail media advertisers will continue to spend. A full three-quarters of advertisers said they will increase their retail media ad spending in 2025, per November 2024 Ebiquity data. And almost one-third said they were targeting a double-digit increase in their spending.
That extra spending could bring to a head several issues that have been simmering for some time, particularly for advertisers that have yet to come up with a coherent vision for how their retail and national media budgets work together.
“There’s going to continue to be this conversation between retailers and brands about ‘what is the right balance?’” says Jeff Daniel, general manager of retail data partnerships at The Trade Desk. “Now that there’s all this retail data-enabled off-site scale I can see and use, how do I reconcile it with my national media?”
Saturated market?
Then there is the issue of saturation of the retail media market. Used a certain way, retail media networks offer the prospect of unusually high ROI to advertisers. But the complexity of spending with too many of them—never mind comparing the results—seemed like it could limit the upside of long-tail RMNs.
However, that has far from snuffed out brands’ willingness to try new ones. The percentage of CPG brands spending on four or more RMNs rose to 85% in 2024 – up nearly 20 points YoY, according to the Path to Purchase Institute.
Challenger brands that might not be locked into multiple joint business partnerships — and that are still hungry to learn how their products resonate with different audience segments — are showing a particular openness to experimenting. “Clients are in more of an expansion, test-and-learn mindset with some of these RMNs,” said Sejal Sheth, vice president of digital commerce and media at Harvest Group.
Read the full report, Retail Media Forecast Report Update.