Seeing an ad and buying the product used to be separated by a series of steps: notice it, remember it, look it up, find it, buy it. Those steps are collapsing into one. eMarketer projects US advertisers will spend $71.09 billion on retail media in 2026, on the way to commerce media reaching $142.07 billion by 2030, and the reason isn’t just budget growth. It’s that the ad and the purchase are becoming the same moment.
From watching to buying without leaving the screen
More than 30% of US internet users made at least one shoppable media purchase in 2025, and eMarketer projects 89.3 million shoppable media buyers in 2026, 38.5% of all digital buyers. On CTV specifically, platforms like Amazon, Albertsons Media Collective, and Instacart have built formats that let a viewer buy without changing screens, though only 10% of US adults have done so via CTV so far, per eMarketer and Bizrate Insights, a gap that signals early innings, not a ceiling.
That gap matters. Media is no longer just setting up a sale that closes somewhere else later. In these formats, it’s completing the sale itself.
Why CTV is where this is moving fastest
41.8% of marketers are already using interactive and shoppable formats across social and CTV combined, per eMarketer and Smartly. Retail money is following: eMarketer expects one in five CTV ad dollars to go to retail media by 2027, and Walmart’s completed $1.4 billion acquisition of self-serve CTV platform Vibe.co, folding it into Walmart Connect, shows how much retail investment is following shoppers onto the living room screen.
At Media Manager, we treat this shift as a planning problem before it’s a budget problem: shopper data is becoming a targeting input for offline media, not a reporting layer that shows up after the campaign runs. We help clients build commerce data into the plan itself, not reconcile it afterward.
What this means going forward
The brands that adapt fastest won’t be the ones spending the most on shoppable formats. They’ll be the ones that stop treating exposure and purchase as two separate stages. Media and the transaction were never really two different jobs. They’re merging into one.
