Retail Media’s Biggest Missed Opportunity: The Retail Majority

Retail media’s rise has been fast and decisive. Spending is projected to reach $71.1 billion in 2026, with nearly every major retailer now offering advertisers some version of a retail media network.

The names leading the charge are familiar: Amazon.com, Walmart, Kroger, Albertsons. These platforms have proven that when purchase data, media inventory, and measurement live under one roof, advertising can deliver performance directly tied to sales.

However, amid all this momentum, retail media has quietly overlooked the retail majority: the hundreds of thousands of independent stores, small chains, and regional businesses where a majority of consumer purchases still happen.

Why the Retail Majority Has Been Overlooked

Independent and regional retailers are highly fragmented, operating across different point-of-sale systems, loyalty programs, and data environments. Individually, they don’t have the scale to attract national advertising budgets or justify building media businesses of their own.

As a result, retail media investment has flowed toward the national chains, not because they represent the full scope of commerce, but because they’re the easiest places to activate data and measure outcomes.

This has created a distorted perception in the market, where retail media is synonymous with retail giants and that the rest of retail is simply too complex to organize at scale.

That assumption is no longer tenable.

Why the Retail Majority is So Valuable

While e-commerce and delivery platforms dominate headlines, the majority of retail transactions still occur in physical stores across grocery, convenience, liquor, specialty retail, and other everyday categories. In fact, in-store sales represented 84.5 percent of total U.S. retail sales in 2025.

In practice, consumers in those environments have been difficult to address. Purchase data, media activation, and measurement have historically lived in separate systems, making it nearly impossible to drive and prove performance at scale. As a result, advertisers have relied on impressions and proxy metrics instead of outcomes.

But tolerance for estimated results is disappearing. Advertisers now demand incrementality, transparency, and clear connections between spend and sales.

If the retail majority becomes addressable, it will unlock billions of ad dollars for smaller merchants as well as untapped audiences and incremental sales for advertisers.

How to Unlock the Retail Majority

Unlocking the retail majority begins with empowering retailers to capture more value from their customer transactions, while building a more measurable and reliable environment for advertisers to grow.

Without consistent, normalized transaction data, scale will always be out of reach. Therefore, purchase data must be unified across fragmented retailers into shared systems of record.

In addition, media activation must extend beyond the storefronts. A viable performance channel requires both on-site engagement and off-site reach, allowing purchase data to inform media strategies that reach consumers wherever they regularly spend time.

Lastly, measurement has to be standardized and tied to outcomes. Retail media will only earn sustained budgets when advertisers can compare performance across retailers and channels with confidence.

When these pieces operate as a single system, the retail majority stops looking like a collection of individual businesses and starts behaving like a unified performance network.

Retailers gain new revenue and customer insight without operational burden, while advertisers gain access to high-intent shoppers at scale (measured against sales). Plus, retail media matures into a channel that's more representative of the total audience.

Where Retail Media Goes Next

The next phase of retail media will be defined by who can deliver performance with credibility.

The retail majority represents the largest untapped performance opportunity in retail media. Retail media’s future will be shaped by those who build the system that enables the retail majority to make its mark on advertising.

Michael Blanche is the co-founder and co-CEO of Surfside, the operating system for the retail majority.