Commerce Media 2027: What Changes Outside Retail (Forecast)

Five things are scheduled or forecast for 2027: financial media spend doubles again; card networks move offers to point of sale and wallets; airline and hotel networks fold into loyalty economics; offsite becomes a clean-room product, not an audience export; agentic checkout starts routing purchases networks must measure. Retail stays concentrated, so non-retail networks compete for existing budgets.

The only audited financial media revenue line is Klarna's $180 million for 2024 (Payments Dive, 19 March 2025); banks report merchant spend driven instead, such as Chase's $11.2 billion in 2025 (chase.com, accessed 17 October 2026). eMarketer's forecast path implies the category passes $1 billion during 2026 and heads toward $3.15 billion in 2028 (eMarketer, January 2026). The 2027 question is which model carries the growth: offers (Chase, Mastercard, Citi), onsite media (Klarna, Amex Ads) or offsite (PayPal). The models are compared in Financial media networks explained. Our reading: offers carry volume because they need no new consent, onsite carries revenue where a shopping surface exists, and offsite stays a PayPal-shaped exception until clean-room activation is standard.

Mastercard's stated roadmap is distribution into point of sale and digital wallets (Marketing Dive, 1 October 2025). If it lands in 2027, an offer becomes visible at the terminal or in the wallet at the moment of payment rather than in a bank app beforehand, which changes measurement (exposure and purchase collapse into one event) and raises the consent question in the EU, where the EDPB separates PSD2 contractual consent from GDPR consent for marketing (EDPB Guidelines 06/2020). Visa has no comparable media product in the public record as of October 2026. For issuers, the practical consequence is that the card network becomes a distribution partner competing with the bank's own channel; the architecture for keeping decisioning in-house while renting distribution is in How a bank can launch a media network without moving customer data.

United's 2026 reorganisation moved Kinective Media under the MileagePlus partnerships team and refocused it on seatback screens and Starlink (Adweek, 2026). Marriott relaunched its network in-house in June 2025 with closed-loop attribution and 237 million Bonvoy members (Hospitality Net, 12 June 2025). Expedia's advertising and media revenue grew 19% to $758 million in 2025 (Expedia Group 10-K, FY2025). Our reading for 2027: airline and hotel media is sold as part of partnership and co-brand deals, with tourism boards and travel brands as the natural buyers (United's Cayman Islands campaign is the published example, with more than 9,000 bookings (Skift, 16 March 2026)), and the OTAs, not the carriers, take most non-endemic budget. The eMarketer travel media figure of $2.96 billion for 2026 predates these changes (eMarketer, September 2024).

Every non-retail network that went offsite in 2024–2026 did so through a clean room or an owner-run graph: CVS with Pinterest and Reddit (Beet.TV, 16 July 2025), Boots with LiveRamp and Criteo (ExchangeWire, 12 November 2024), PayPal on its own transaction graph (PayPal, 17 September 2025). With Chrome keeping third-party cookies and retiring the Privacy Sandbox APIs, the identity layer for offsite is a mix of consented identifiers and first-party graphs rather than a browser API; see Identity after Privacy Sandbox. Our reading: in 2027 a non-retail network that cannot offer clean-room overlap and incrementality will not get offsite budgets, whatever its audience size. The options are compared in Clean room architectures compared.

Mastercard launched Agent Pay in April 2025 and reported a first live agentic payment in March 2026; Visa's Intelligent Commerce and Trusted Agent Protocol have partners in sandbox; Google's AP2 is a shared mandate format that Visa and Stripe have joined (Digital Transactions, 17 July 2026). These sources are secondary and the rollout timelines are not published, so this is the least certain item. The consequence for media networks, if it happens, is that an agent rather than a person sees the offer, and attribution has to follow a token-scoped purchase rather than a session. The advertising-side standards for agents, AAMP and AdCP, are tracked in AAMP vs AdCP.

Retail media remains most of commerce media and most of its concentration: Amazon's retail media revenue is projected to exceed $75 billion by 2028 (eMarketer, November 2025). Non-retail networks therefore grow by taking budget from existing lines, which is eMarketer's framing of "winning dollars that already have a home" (eMarketer, 2026). The regulatory boundaries also hold: GLBA and Regulation P for US banks, CPNI for carriers, HIPAA and state health laws for pharmacies, GDPR and PSD2 in the EU. None of the live networks has publicly moved record-level data to an advertiser, and we expect none to in 2027.

How big will commerce media be in 2027? eMarketer's May 2025 forecast has US commerce media on a path to $118.4 billion by 2029 at a 15.3% compound rate, with incremental spend peaking at about $17 billion in 2027 (eMarketer, May 2025; eMarketer, 2026). Retail is most of it; financial media networks are forecast at $3.15 billion by 2028 (eMarketer, January 2026).

Will banks and airlines keep launching networks? Banks and card networks, yes: Mastercard (October 2025), Amex (October 2025) and Citi via Kard (August 2026) all entered in the last year. Airlines are consolidating around United's Kinective Media, which sells for JetBlue; Delta is the only announced new entrant and has no launch date (Adweek, 2026). No European airline has a first-party-data network as of October 2026.

What is agentic commerce and why does it matter for media networks? Agentic commerce is a purchase made by a software agent on a person's behalf using a scoped payment token, as in Mastercard Agent Pay or Visa Intelligent Commerce (Digital Transactions, 17 July 2026). If it scales, offers and ads are evaluated by the agent, and attribution follows the token rather than a session. Rollout timelines are not public.

Will offsite commerce media grow outside retail? Only where a network can prove overlap and incrementality without moving records, which in practice means a clean room or an owner-run graph. PayPal is the only payments company selling open-web ads at scale (PayPal, 17 September 2025); pharmacy and loyalty networks use clean rooms with publishers.

What should a non-retail network build in 2027? In this order: a consent store, an audience engine with segment floors, an offers or sponsored-listings product on owned surfaces, holdout-based measurement, and a clean room; an owned bidder for offsite comes last. The sequence and the architecture are in How a bank can launch a media network without moving customer data.

Use the commerce media guide to compare the related operating models, definitions and evidence before making this decision.

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18. Expedia Group, Form 10-K FY2025. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1324424/000132442426000008/expe-20251231.htm
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21. CFOtech on SAS, "Banks tap financial media networks for ad revenues" (December 2025). https://cfotech.co.uk/story/banks-tap-financial-media-networks-for-ad-revenues
22. Payments Dive, Klarna F-1 advertising revenue (19 March 2025). https://www.paymentsdive.com/news/klarna-buy-now-pay-later-bnpl-merchant-advertising-revenue/742883/
23. Chase Media Solutions site (accessed 17 October 2026). https://www.chase.com/mediasolutions/home
24. EDPB, Guidelines 06/2020 on PSD2 and GDPR (final version, December 15, 2020). https://www.edpb.europa.eu/sites/default/files/files/file1/edpb_guidelines_202006_psd2_afterpublicconsultation_en.pdf
25. Beet.TV, CVS Media Exchange and Reddit (16 July 2025). https://www.beet.tv/2025/07/from-retail-media-to-reddit-cvs-media-exchange-celebrates-five-years.html
26. ExchangeWire, LiveRamp and Criteo with Boots (12 November 2024). https://www.exchangewire.com/blog/2024/11/12/liveramp-criteo-collaborate-to-propel-first-party-data-capabilities-for-omnichannel-retail-media-with-boots-as-launch-partner/