Vendor reportKantar, 2026

Retail Media Networks deliver results 1.8 times better than digital ads and nearly three times better for purchase intent

Channel mix & planning

Reader Note:: From the Kantar LIFT database, as cited inside Marketing Trends 2026: retail media networks returned 1.8 times better results than digital ads and nearly 3 times better results for purchase intent. What is being compared, over what campaigns and with what attribution, is not published. The same trend reports that a net 38% of marketers plan to increase retail media investment in 2026, from Kantar's Media Reactions. Marketing Trends is a curated digest with no sample size or fieldwork date published for any of its figures.
Evidence:: Modelled / projected
Vendor interest:: Moderate — This comes from a company with a commercial interest in this market, so it is not a neutral source.
Sample:: Not disclosed

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Getting a rough orientation, and deciding what to check yourself.

Not for

Reporting as what happened. This is what a model expects, not what anyone counted.
This is an aggregated or average number that covers very different cases. Real results in a particular segment may differ.
The source never says how this number was measured.
The source never says when this data was collected. It could be considerably older than the publication date suggests.
The source never says how big its sample was or what went into it.
This comes from a company with a commercial interest in this market, so it is not a neutral source.

Paid media overtook martech as the largest slice of the marketing budget between 2018 and 2025, rising from 23.2% to 30.6% while martech fell from 29.2% to 22.4%

Change in marketing budget allocation by resource, 2018 to 2025
Resource	Change 2018 to 2025 (percentage points)
Paid media	7.4
Labor	-2.6
Agencies	-2.3
Martech	-6.8

33.8%

of US Fashion site visits now come from paid channels (Search + Social + Display), overtaking Direct traffic's 27.8% share for the first time in three years (Jul 2023–Jul 2026).

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Fixing your influencer marketing campaign: How to get into the top 10% of advertisers

53.9% of US marketing leaders say marketing keeps influencing a customer for a year or longer, though the most common single answer is several months at 24.4% and the report's median is six months

Marketing Performance: Perceived marketing influence duration on customers, as reported by US CMOs in 2026
Duration	Percent (%)
An hour	0.6%
12 hours	0.6%
A day	1.3%
A week	2.6%
A month	6.4%
Several months	24.4%
6 months	10.3%
1 year	21.8%
2 years	18.6%
5 years	9%
7 years	0%
10 years or more	4.5%

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9.6%

of overall budget and company revenues go to marketing on average (2026 survey of US companies)

SEO, social, email, retail media and influencer all rank higher on impact than on the budget they receive

Marketing budgets ranged from 5.8% to 9.7% of company revenue across industries in 2025, with consumer products highest and IT and business services lowest

Marketing budget as a percent of total revenue by industry, 2025
Industry	2025 (%)
Consumer products	9.7%
Manufacturing	9.5%
Pharma	9%
Media	8%
Insurance	7.5%
Financial services	7.2%
Retail	7.1%
Tech services and products companies with over $250M revenue	7.1%
Travel and hospitality	6.7%
Healthcare	5.9%
IT and business services	5.8%

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Retail Media Networks deliver results 1.8 times better than digital ads and nearly three times better for purchase intent

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