Ad Tech
The TV remote becomes a checkout button: retail media collides with CTV
The two fastest-growing forces in advertising spent the last year discovering each other. Retail media — ads bought against retailers' purchase data — will reach an estimated $69.3 billion in US spend in 2026, up from $58.8 billion, per eMarketer. Connected TV, meanwhile, has scale and sight-sound-motion, but has always lacked what retailers own: knowledge of what people actually buy.
Hence the land grab. eMarketer measured retail-media CTV spending up 45.5% in 2025, and projects roughly one in five CTV ad dollars flowing through retail media by 2027. The platform chessboard moved accordingly: Walmart bought Vizio and is shifting its Onn TVs to Vizio's SmartCast to own the shopper's screen outright, while Amazon and Roku struck a partnership giving advertisers access to a combined 80 million logged-in US households through Amazon's ad platform, per eMarketer's analysis.
The formats are maturing past the QR-code novelty phase: remote-clickable overlays, add-to-cart from the couch, and closed-loop attribution tying an ad exposure on the TV to a purchase at the register — the measurement trick that made retail media explode on the web, now applied to television.
The strategic read: TV platforms want retail data to prove ads work; retailers want TV reach to grow beyond their own sites. Each has what the other lacks — which is why the dealmaking should keep coming, and why "commerce" is quietly becoming a standard tab in every CTV platform's sales deck.