NEW YORK – September 30, 2026 -- Eighty-six percent of advertisers say slow audience fulfillment could cause them to cut spending or abandon a retail media network partner, according to GrowthLoop's 2026 Commerce Media Investment Index. The study, conducted with Ascend2, surveyed nearly 300 U.S. and Canadian marketing professionals involved in retail media network (RMN) or commerce media network (CMN) advertising decisions.
Advertisers will pay more for faster data delivery
Eighty-five percent of respondents say they would pay a premium for same-day audience fulfillment, while 92% would increase spend with faster activation. Ninety-four percent said they would likely spend more with partners offering self-service audience-building tools. Advertisers reporting the strongest ROI are five times more likely than others to receive custom audiences the same day.
Budget growth coexists with execution risk
The majority of advertisers allocate at least 15% of their digital advertising budgets to commerce media networks, and 90% work with two or more RMN or CMN partners. No respondents plan to decrease commerce media spend over the next year, and 85% plan to increase it. Yet 32% of advertisers have reduced, paused, or reconsidered investment specifically because of difficulty proving ROI to leadership.
Audience scale remains a bottleneck
Only 38% of advertisers are extremely satisfied with the number of audiences available through their current partners, while 95% say more segment access would make them more likely to increase spend. Confidence in measurement is similarly thin: just 40% are very confident in their partners' incrementality measurement, though those with high confidence spend a larger share of their digital budget on RMN/CMN and are more than twice as likely to significantly exceed ROI targets.
Performance data often arrives too late to act on
Nearly half of advertisers wait at least one week for post-campaign performance data, and only 8% receive it the same day. Just 32% say they can consistently use campaign results to optimize future audience targeting.
Gopuff cites sixfold audience expansion after warehouse-native rollout
Gopuff, the instant commerce platform, said implementing a warehouse-native stack increased its audience segments from 100 to more than 600, while segments for its BevMo! subsidiary expanded from 75 to 400. JR Crosby, director of data partnerships at Gopuff, said the expanded catalogs give internal teams and brand partners a broader range of ready-to-use targeting options.
Anthony Rotio, co-founder and co-CEO of GrowthLoop, said advertisers are directly telling media networks what it takes to win more budget: better audiences, faster activation, and results delivered quickly enough to inform the next campaign.