The biggest channel in advertising is no longer television. As of this year it's commerce media — and the people who built careers on managing it by hand are about to find out the platforms want that job back.
WPP Media's latest forecast puts commerce media at $178.2B in global ad revenue, overtaking TV's $171.1B for the first time. Retail media networks are the bulk of that — roughly $174B and growing double digits into 2026. Amazon and Walmart alone command about 88% of US retail media share. This stopped being an emerging channel a while ago. It's now the channel.
But the headline number isn't the interesting part. The interesting part is what's happening to who does the work.
The platforms are eating the agency layer
For a decade, the retail media value chain had a comfortable middle: agencies, specialist shops, and an army of campaign managers who knew the quirks of each platform's ad console and charged for the labor of running it. That middle is being automated from the inside out. Amazon's Ads Agent beta is already posting 18% lower CPMs and 16% lower CPAs by moving campaign mechanics onto the platform side. Walmart's Marty — an agentic assistant for suppliers and advertisers — now handles onboarding, orders, and campaign management directly.
I've lived the front edge of this. At Zeta I sold an AI customer-acquisition product into retail, e-commerce, and travel brands that didn't have a budget line for it yet. The hardest part was never the technology — it was convincing a brand to reallocate from a channel they understood to one they didn't. That objection is gone now. The budgets have moved. What hasn't caught up is the way most people in this ecosystem price their value, and that's the gap worth paying attention to.
What the agents commoditize — and what they don't
Be honest about what a platform-side agent is genuinely good at: bid management, budget pacing, keyword expansion, creative variant testing, the daily console babysitting that used to justify a retainer. If that's the core of what you or your team sells, the floor is dropping out, and it's dropping fast. Amazon and Walmart have every incentive to automate it — cheaper, faster execution on their own platform means more spend flows through them and the agency tax shrinks.
Here's what the agent can't do, at least not yet. It can't tell a brand which retailers to bet on and which to abandon. It can't arbitrate the channel conflict between a CPG's shopper-marketing team and its brand team. It can't build a clean-room measurement story that ties Amazon spend to incremental sales the CFO will believe. And it has every reason notto give you honest cross-platform measurement — Amazon's agent will never tell you to move budget to Walmart. That last point is the whole game.
The seller's read
If you sell into or around retail media, reprice your value this quarter. Stop charging for execution the platforms are giving away and start charging for the three things they structurally can't provide: independent strategy across competing retailers, first-party data and clean-room measurement the platforms have a conflict of interest in obscuring, and the human judgment to decide where a finite budget actually goes. The agencies that survive this shift will look less like campaign shops and more like independent advisors who happen to be fluent in the consoles.
And if you sell anything else — martech, measurement, CDPs, retail tech — the agentic shift is the opening. The $136B agentic-commerce market is forecast to hit $1.7T by 2030, with Walmart's and Etsy's OpenAI partnerships as the early signals. Every brand suddenly relying on platform-side agents needs an independent layer of truth sitting above those agents. That layer is the product.
The takeaway
Commerce media passing TV is the kind of milestone that makes the trade press for a day and then gets forgotten. The thing to actually do something about is the automation happening underneath it. The platforms are taking the keyboard. Your value isn't the keystrokes anymore — it's the judgment about where to point the machine, and the honesty the machine has a reason to withhold.