Where Brand Budgets Are Moving: Retail Media, Creators, and the End of the Funnel

For two decades, the media plan was a tidy descent: broad awareness at the top, consideration in the middle, a sliver of performance at the bottom. That model is dissolving. The dollars that once flowed predictably to linear television, search, and open-web display are now being pulled toward two gravitational centers that barely existed at scale a decade ago: retail media networks and creators. What connects them is not format but proximity to the transaction. Spend is migrating toward surfaces that sit closest to a purchase and can prove they moved it.

This is not a marginal reallocation. It is a structural rewrite of where budgets live, who controls the data, and what counts as a result. The brands and agencies adapting fastest have stopped asking how many people saw an ad and started asking a harder question: how many bought because of it.

Retail media became the third great ad channel

The clearest signal of the shift is the rise of retail media networks, the advertising businesses run by retailers and marketplaces on top of their own checkout data. Amazon built the template; Walmart Connect, the retail media arms of Target, Kroger, Instacart, and a long tail of grocers and big-box chains have followed. Industry estimates through 2025 consistently ranked retail media as the fastest-growing major advertising category, with global spend measured in the tens of billions of dollars and analysts projecting it would rival or surpass traditional digital display within the decade.

The logic is hard to argue with. As third-party cookies degraded and privacy regimes tightened, the open web lost much of its targeting precision. Retailers, by contrast, sit on deterministic first-party data: real people, logged in, with verified purchase histories. An ad served against that data can be tied directly to a sale in the same environment. For a packaged-goods brand, the appeal is obvious, but it carries a familiar dependency. Spending inside a retailer's walled garden means renting that retailer's audience and accepting its measurement on its terms, a dynamic we examined in The Rented Algorithm.

Creator budgets graduated from experiment to infrastructure

The second center of gravity is the creator economy, and the meaningful change is not that brands work with creators but how the line item is now justified. For years, influencer marketing lived in an experimental corner of the budget, measured loosely by reach and engagement and treated as a brand-awareness play. That framing is gone. Reporting through 2025 indicated creator and influencer spend climbing into the tens of billions globally, with a growing share moving from one-off sponsored posts toward always-on partnerships, affiliate-linked commerce, and creator-led storefronts.

Several forces converged. Social platforms compressed the distance between content and checkout through shoppable video and in-app purchase, turning a creator's feed into a point of sale. The collapse of organic reach pushed brands toward voices audiences actually trust. And the maturation of creator businesses, with their own audiences, production capacity, and data, made them credible full-funnel partners rather than rented reach. The sharpest operators now treat creators as a distribution channel they help capitalize, a thesis we developed in The End of the Sponsorship Era.

The question clients now ask is no longer how many people saw the ad, but how many bought because of it, and whether they would have bought anyway.

The funnel is collapsing into the surface

What ties retail media and creators together is the erosion of the funnel as a sequence. On a retail media surface, a shopper discovers, considers, and buys in the same session. In a creator's shoppable post, awareness and conversion happen in a single tap. The neat handoffs between top, middle, and bottom of funnel, with different teams, budgets, and metrics for each, no longer map to how people actually buy.

This is what operators mean by full-funnel commerce: a single motion in which a brand pays to be discovered, considered, and purchased on the same surface, and expects to measure all three together. The implication for budgets is significant. Money once cleanly labeled brand or performance is being recombined into integrated commerce spend, and the agency disciplines that grew up around those silos are being forced to merge. It also intensifies the pressure to own the customer relationship directly rather than leasing it from a platform, the argument behind Own Your Audience.

What clients are now demanding

The reallocation is being driven, more than anything, by a change in what clients will accept as proof. Three demands recur across brand and agency conversations:

• Incrementality over attribution. Sophisticated advertisers no longer want credit for sales that would have happened anyway. They are pushing for incrementality testing and geo-based holdouts to isolate the spend that genuinely drove new demand, and they are skeptical of platforms that grade their own homework.
• Closed-loop measurement. Clients want a verifiable line from exposure to purchase, which is precisely what retail media and creator commerce can offer when the buy and the sale happen in the same environment. The premium on first-party, deterministic data is now the organizing principle of the media plan.
• Outcomes, not impressions. Reach and engagement are being demoted to diagnostics. The currency that matters is sales lift, new-customer acquisition, and return on ad spend, and budgets are flowing to the channels that can report it credibly.

Where the measurement, and the money, are heading

The direction of travel is toward consolidation around surfaces that own both the audience and the transaction. That is a comfortable position for the largest retailers and platforms and an uncomfortable one for the open web, where measurement is fragmented and proof of incrementality is hard to assemble. Expect retail media to extend beyond the digital shelf into connected TV and in-store screens, and expect creator commerce to keep absorbing budget as attribution improves.

The risks are real and worth naming plainly. Walled gardens marking their own homework, measurement standards that vary by platform, and the privacy and disclosure scrutiny that follows any system built on personal purchase data are all live tensions, not solved problems. There is also a deeper structural question about whether an economy optimized relentlessly for the bottom of the funnel underinvests in the brand-building that creates demand in the first place, a concern that runs through The Attention Recession.

For operators, the practical takeaway is clear. The budget is moving toward proximity and proof: channels close to the transaction that can demonstrate they caused it. For creators, it means the opportunity is no longer to rent attention but to own a measurable commerce relationship. The funnel, as a metaphor and as an org chart, is ending. What replaces it is a single, instrumented surface where discovery and purchase are the same act, and where the only metric that survives is whether the money moved the needle.