Retail media hires creators

Retailers are starting to buy creator-made videos as media inventory inside their ad businesses, not just as social posts. (modernretail.co) Modern Retail reported on April 13 that ad teams at Walmart, Best Buy and Albertsons are building creator-led campaigns for brands and using retailer sales data to decide which creators to hire. Walmart Connect expanded an Omnicom Media partnership at the January 2026 Consumer Electronics Show to match Walmart purchase data with Meta’s Instagram creator data. (modernretail.co) (digiday.com) That changes the pitch from “buy an ad slot” to “buy content plus measurement.” Omnicom said the Walmart-Meta link helps its Creo unit find creators whose followers show stronger conversion potential based on product, category or audience data, rather than follower counts alone. (digiday.com) (transform.omg.com) Retail media networks are the ad arms that retailers built around their first-party shopping data, and the money is already large. Nielsen cited eMarketer figures showing United States retail media spending would reach $60 billion in 2025 and $100 billion by 2028, with 65% of marketers saying these networks would play a bigger role in their media mix. (nielsen.com) Creator spending is growing fast too. The Interactive Advertising Bureau said creator-economy ad spend rose from $13.9 billion in 2021 to $29.5 billion in 2024 and was projected to hit $37 billion in 2025, while 48% of ad buyers called creators a “must buy.” (iab.com) Those two markets are converging because retailers want budgets beyond trade marketing and sponsored search. EMARKETER reported on February 25 that retail media networks are pushing into brand and national ad budgets, and analysts said creators give retailers a path to that money because they can tie creator exposure back to transaction data. (emarketer.com) The content itself is being built for more than one screen. Linqia said on September 30, 2025 that its retail media offering was designed to place creator content across social media, connected television, digital out-of-home and retailer touchpoints inside the shopper journey, and Albertsons said a Lunar New Year campaign with creators delivered engagement more than four times higher on Facebook and three times higher on Instagram versus benchmarks. (linqia.com) (modernretail.co) Best Buy is packaging creators the same way it packages sports and seasonal media. In September 2025, Best Buy Ads said it would work with Dude Perfect through 2026, and the retailer later said the group would publish YouTube Shorts tied to season two of Tomorrow’s Golf League starting December 31. (mediapost.com) (corporate.bestbuy.com) Measurement is still the sticking point, especially once campaigns move from phones to store aisles. A report covered by WWD on April 13 said in-store media budgets have lagged because brands, merchants, agencies and retail media networks use different scorecards, and the authors argued that physical-store campaigns should be judged by “product movement” instead of web-style clicks. (wwd.com) The Interactive Advertising Bureau said on April 14 that commerce media’s next phase will depend on proving measurable business impact across digital and physical channels, not just adding more inventory. That leaves retailers hiring creators for a stricter job: make content that can travel from Instagram to in-store screens and still show up in sales data. (morningstar.com)