Author: Bill Ross | Published: May 29, 2026 | Updated: May 29, 2026 Consumer packaged goods marketing has moved its center of gravity. The budget that once flowed almost entirely to television and national display now follows shoppers to the digital shelf, where retail media, online grocery, and AI-assisted work decide who gets seen and who gets skipped. This guide pulls the hard numbers behind that shift and projects where they land through 2028, so CPG teams can plan spend, channel mix, and capability building with a clear view of the trend lines instead of last year’s assumptions. Key takeaways from this report: Retail media won CPG budgets because it solves the problem that broke open-web advertising: knowing whether an ad actually sold anything. When a brand buys a sponsored placement on Amazon or Walmart, the retailer can tie the impression to a real purchase using its own loyalty and checkout data. That closed loop matters more every quarter as third-party cookies fade and CPG teams face rising input costs that force every dollar to prove itself. The spending curve shows how fast this happened. US retail media passed its first $30 billion year in 2021, then climbed past $60 billion in 2025. Our projection holds growth near a 17% compound rate rather than the 30% spikes of the early years, because the channel has moved past the early-majority stage of adoption and a fixed ad budget can only stretch so far. If you treat retail media as a test line item rather than a core channel, you risk planning your 2027 budget around a media mix that no longer reflects where shoppers decide. What is pulling CPG dollars into retail media:
Retail media is not a new ad format. It is the place where shopper intent, inventory, and proof of sale finally live in one system. Brands that still treat it as a bolt-on are funding the channel that beats them. – Emulent Strategy Team
Knowing the channel is growing is only half the planning question. The harder one is where inside retail media your money actually goes, because the field is far from even. The retail media market looks less like a marketplace and more like a duopoly with a crowd behind it. Amazon controlled about 80% of US retail media spend in 2025, Walmart Connect held 8%, and every other network, from Target Roundel to grocery and delivery players, split single digits. Our projection widens the gap, since Amazon and Walmart are set to absorb close to 89% of incremental spend through 2026, and most smaller networks hold flat or lose share. For a CPG brand, this creates a real tension. The two leaders deliver the reach and the data depth no challenger can match, so concentrating there is rational. The cost is pricing power. When two platforms own the auction, ad rates drift up and you have little room to negotiate. Brands that never test scaled challengers like the delivery intermediaries, which now run near billion-dollar ad businesses, lose the option to shift spend when the leaders raise prices. A useful habit is to run a competitive audit on where rivals are buying, because their absence from a network can signal either a gap to exploit or a trap to avoid. How to think about network allocation: Concentration on the platforms is one symptom of a deeper change. The reason these networks exist at all is that shoppers themselves moved online, and that migration is still underway. Online grocery stopped being a pandemic story and became a habit. Penetration sat at 8.8% of US grocery sales in 2020 and reached about 13.8% on a full-year basis in 2025, with December already peaking near 19% as holiday demand pushed shoppers online. We project a climb toward 17% by 2028, following a logarithmic path rather than a straight line. Online grocery grows roughly five times faster than in-store, yet more than 80% of grocery spending stays physical because fresh selection and same-day need keep people in aisles. This matters for CPG marketing because digital and physical shelves reward different work. The physical shelf rewards packaging and placement. The digital shelf rewards titles, images, reviews, search terms, and structured product content that both retailer search and AI shopping tools can read. Younger shoppers lead this shift, so studying Gen Z and Gen Alpha purchase behavior tells you where penetration heads next. If your product pages read like an afterthought, you lose the sale before price or brand ever enters the picture, and a strong content strategy for the digital shelf becomes the difference between being found and being filtered out.
The digital shelf is the new point of distribution. A weak product detail page in 2026 is the same mistake as a product that never made it onto the store shelf in 2006. – Emulent Strategy Team
What the digital shelf demands from CPG brands: As shoppers and budgets move online, the volume of content and optimization work climbs past what manual teams can handle. That pressure is why AI has spread through CPG marketing so quickly. Generative AI adoption among marketers followed a textbook diffusion curve. Just over half used it in 2024, about 87% used it in at least one workflow by 2026, and we expect the figure to settle near 95% by 2028 as the last holdouts run out of reasons to wait. The interesting question is no longer whether teams use AI but where it earns its keep. In CPG, the strongest returns sit in the repetitive, high-volume work the digital shelf created. Writing and adapting hundreds of product descriptions, generating retail media ad variations, and summarizing shopper reviews are tasks where AI compresses days into hours. The weakest returns sit in strategy and brand judgment, where AI drafts but cannot decide. AI also reshapes discovery itself, since shoppers now ask assistants for product recommendations, which makes AI search optimization a real channel rather than a curiosity. Teams that ignore this risk watching their products go unmentioned in the tools shoppers increasingly trust, and a simple AI SEO checklist is a low-cost way to start. Reaching shoppers wherever they search, across retailer sites, Google, and AI assistants, is the logic behind search everywhere optimization. Where AI delivers the clearest CPG returns:
AI does not replace the marketer who understands the category. It removes the busywork that kept that marketer from doing the thinking only they can do. – Emulent Strategy Team
These four trends do not operate in isolation. They point at a single capability that decides which CPG brands grow profitably and which simply spend more. The dividing line is measurement, not budget. Retail media, the digital shelf, and AI all generate data, and the brands that connect that data into a clear view of what drives a profitable sale will outpace brands that chase reach. A team that knows its true customer lifetime value can justify paying more on Amazon for a repeat-buying household, while a team flying on platform-reported metrics will overspend on one-time buyers and call it growth. Concentration makes this discipline urgent. When two platforms set the price of reach, the only durable edge is buying smarter than competitors, which means owning your own incrementality measurement rather than trusting the seller’s scorecard. The same logic applies to brand work. Performance spend captures demand that already exists, but it cannot create the preference that lowers your acquisition cost over time, which is why a deliberate brand strategy still matters even in a performance-driven channel. Brands that cut all brand investment to feed retail media often find their costs rising every year, because they keep renting demand they never built. The capabilities that compound through 2028: We help consumer packaged goods brands build the parts of this picture that compound: a retail media plan that anchors on the leaders without surrendering pricing power, a digital shelf presence that gets found by both shoppers and AI tools, and a measurement approach that tells you which spend actually drives profit. We bring the strategy, the content, and the optimization work together so your team spends on signal instead of guesswork. If you want help turning these CPG marketing trends into a plan your team can act on, reach out to the Emulent team for a straightforward conversation about where your brand can win next.
CPG Marketing Trends and 2026-2028 Projections
CPG Marketing Trends and 2026-2028 Projections
Why has retail media become the default home for CPG ad budgets?
Should you concentrate retail media spend or spread it across networks?
How fast is the digital shelf replacing the physical one?
Where does AI actually change CPG marketing work?
What separates the CPG brands that win the shopper in 2026-2028?
How Emulent helps CPG brands turn these trends into growth
