Retail media grows from ad channel to digital shelf rent

For years, the advertising industry has spoken about the rise of digital as though all boats were rising together. Search grew, social grew, video grew, commerce grew, and somewhere amid all this growth, television was politely informed that its best years might be behind it.

But India’s latest advertising numbers tell a more specific story.

According to Media Partners Asia, more than 70% of the incremental advertising spend added in India over the past five years went into non-video digital formats. Retail media alone grew nearly tenfold, from around $300 million in 2020 to $3.1 billion in 2025, and now accounts for roughly 20% of the country’s media and entertainment advertising market. By 2031, MPA expects it to become an $8.1 billion business and claim close to one-third of all M&E advertising expenditure in India.

Digital may be growing, but retail media is increasingly doing the heavy lifting.

This becomes more apparent when placed against video. Premium video, encompassing television and premium streaming, saw its share of the advertising market nearly halve from 39% in 2019 to around 20% in 2025, even as revenues remained broadly flat. Linear television has now declined for three consecutive years.

Retail media, meanwhile, can barely stop growing long enough to be measured.

Retail media in India

The dentsu–exchange4media Digital Advertising Report 2026 estimates that advertising expenditure on e-retail platforms increased 55.86% in 2025, from Rs 11,293 crore to Rs 17,601 crore. Almost one in every four rupees spent on digital advertising, according to the report’s definition, was already being spent inside an e-retail environment.

Pitch Madison estimates that quick-commerce advertising rose from around Rs 300 crore in 2023 to approximately Rs 4,000 crore in 2025. WPP’s This Year, Next Year outlook expects total retail media revenues in India to cross Rs 30,000 crore in 2026.

The reports do not measure exactly the same market, but agree on the larger change: commerce-linked advertising is moving from the edge of the media plan towards its centre.

The obvious question is where all that money is coming from.

The easy answer would be television. After all, video’s share is declining just as retail media’s is rising. Marketers, however, say the transfer is neither so direct nor quite so tidy.

“Most retail media growth is currently being funded by a combination of shopper and trade marketing budgets and performance-led search and social spending, not by a wholesale transfer from television,” says Prashant Puri, co-founder and CEO of AdLift.

“We are also seeing some incremental budgets being created for product launches, festive campaigns and commerce experimentation. Search and social remain critical for generating demand, while retail media is increasingly responsible for capturing and measuring that demand.”

This matters because not all the money now counted as retail media would previously have appeared in a media plan.

Says Shaily Mehrotra, CEO and Co-Founder, Fixderma & FCL, “At Fixderma, we view it as a commerce enabler rather than just another advertising channel. Consumers shopping through marketplaces and quick-commerce platforms are digitally engaged and often influenced by social media content, reviews and creator recommendations, making these channels critical for driving high-intent purchases.”

Brands have always paid for shelf space, product promotions, retailer incentives and better placement. Some of those spends sat under trade or shopper marketing; others were treated simply as the cost of distribution. Commerce platforms have added first-party data, targeting, automated buying and attribution, and turned them into something recognisably resembling media.

Or at least recognisably resembling media invoices.

Media evolution

Yasin Hamidani, director at Media Care Brand Solutions, says the category is drawing from multiple pools. “We’re seeing a noticeable shift from shopper marketing, in-store promotions, and trade marketing first, followed by a gradual reallocation from performance-led search and social budgets.”

Television and brand-building media remain relatively protected because they serve different objectives. Retail media, however, has become a core performance channel, particularly for FMCG, beauty, electronics and brands reliant on quick commerce.

The attraction is not difficult to understand. Television may create desire, social may generate consideration and search may reveal intent. But Amazon, Flipkart, Blinkit, Zepto and Swiggy Instamart meet consumers when they are already browsing, comparing and preparing to buy.

They also control the shelf on which that decision is made.

Retail platforms can serve an advertisement, record the resulting transaction and present the entire journey back to the advertiser as a neat, closed loop. That is compelling in an industry where proving advertising’s impact has traditionally involved a certain amount of faith, econometric modelling and interpretive dance.

It also gives the platform closest to the transaction a considerable attribution advantage.

A consumer may discover a product on television, encounter it through a creator, search for reviews and finally purchase it after seeing a sponsored marketplace listing. The retail platform records the last advertisement and sale. The channels that created the original demand have a less direct way of proving their contribution.

Puri says retail media should therefore be judged against incremental sales, new-customer acquisition, repeat purchases and improvements in organic ranking, rather than merely attributed conversions. Brands, he adds, should not accept an unlimited “visibility tax”.

That phrase points to the other side of retail media’s rise. It may be highly effective, but it is becoming progressively less optional.

The first screen of a marketplace or quick-commerce app is now the equivalent of prime supermarket shelf space. Sponsored listings and recommendations occupy the most valuable positions, while products relying entirely on organic discovery risk being pushed further down the page.

“On marketplaces and quick-commerce apps, the first screen has become the new retail shelf, and sponsored placements increasingly operate like digital shelf rent,” says Puri.

Brands can still earn visibility through relevance, reviews, pricing, availability, fulfilment and product content. But in crowded categories, paid promotion is becoming necessary for launches, protecting market share and reminding consumers that the brand exists.

Mihir Mehta, Managing Partner, 0101.Today, believes retail media is rapidly becoming the cost of being discoverable. “On marketplaces and quick-commerce platforms, visibility is no longer guaranteed simply because you have a good product. If several brands are competing in the same category, paid visibility increasingly determines who gets noticed first. However, I think brands should be careful not to reduce retail media to a bidding war. The real advantage lies in using first-party commerce data to understand customer behaviour, optimise product content, improve creative messaging and make smarter media decisions.”

This does not mean brands are being forced to advertise, or that platforms necessarily bury products whose owners refuse to spend. It does mean the line between advertising for growth and paying for basic visibility is getting blurry.

Advertising in 2026

The platform owns the shop, controls the shelf, sells the advertising, records the purchase and reports the result. Few traditional media owners have enjoyed quite so complete a view of the consumer, or quite so many opportunities to charge for it.

According to Mehta, platforms like Amazon, Flipkart, Blinkit and Zepto are no longer just commerce platforms. They've become powerful media ecosystems with rich consumer insights. The brands that succeed won't necessarily be the ones spending the most. They'll be the ones combining retail media investment with better data, stronger creative and a deeper understanding of shopper intent.

The immediacy of the format is best captured by Saurav Jha, general manager, digital, at Justwords.

“The buyer is not being nudged toward a purchase someday; they are being nudged toward a particular purchase, right there,” he says.

That is retail media’s strength. It may also be its limitation.

Jha warns that brands which forget why consumers were searching for them in the first place risk “trading long-term equity for short-term discoverability”. Retail media works best when layered over genuine brand-building activity, rather than expected to replace it.

That being said, as the category grows, marketers will have to distinguish between harvesting demand and creating it, and between sales genuinely generated by advertising and those that happened to pass through the platform reporting them.

By 2031, retail media could command a third of India’s M&E advertising market. At that point, it will no longer be useful to describe it as merely another digital channel. It will be part advertising, part distribution and part rent paid on the digital shelf. And the story of digital advertising’s growth in India may turn out to have been a retail media story all along.