Retail Media Is a Tax Now: Pay Up or Disappear

If you’ve been wondering why your ad dollars feel like they’re buying less oxygen in 2026, it’s because the internet quietly turned into a mall.

And the mall has rent.

Retail media isn’t just “a channel” anymore. It’s a toll booth. The kind where you can see the customer standing 10 feet from checkout… but you still have to pay to be allowed to wave at them.

US retail media ad spend is still climbing hard in 2026—growing faster than social and search—because it’s closest to the sale. That’s the good news. The bad news is that “closest to the sale” also means it’s becoming the most expensive place to be average.

Here’s what that looks like in real life: you launch a product, you do the “right” things, you get some traction, then you realize the shelf is basically a search engine now. The brands with bigger budgets dominate the sponsored placements. The ones without the budget get buried like last season’s jeans.

And before anybody gets righteous about “just make better creative,” please understand: yes, creative matters. But when distribution becomes pay-to-play, brands are forced into a brutal choice—fund performance media forever, or build a demand engine that doesn’t depend on a retailer deciding you’re worthy.

This is why you’re seeing retailers and brands actively experimenting outside the algorithm hamster wheel. At NRF’s Big Show 2026, retailers talked about pushing into more “human-powered” channels like Reddit and Substack to build authority and trust instead of fighting for scraps in crowded feeds. The same conversation included names people actually recognize—American Eagle and Abercrombie & Fitch—which should tell you this isn’t some niche “brand Twitter” fantasy.

The brands suffering right now are the ones who built their whole growth plan on “free reach” and vibes. They’re learning—publicly—that organic discovery isn’t a strategy. It’s a hope. And hope is not a KPI.

The brands winning are doing something that looks boring until you realize how rare it is: they’re building owned attention while still spending where it counts. They use retail media to capture demand, but they don’t rely on it to create demand. They show up in places where people talk like humans—threads, newsletters, community comments—and they earn the kind of familiarity that makes the customer search their name on purpose.

Because in 2026, the real flex isn’t “we have a retail media budget.”

The real flex is: people come looking for us even when we’re not paying to interrupt them.

If that makes you mad, good. Anger is useful. It’s your brain realizing you’ve been paying rent on attention instead of building equity.