“Everyone’s increasing budgets. We should too.” The logic is tempting. Where that spending concentrates also matters.
Reuters, citing Emarketer, forecasts US retail media spending will rise 22.6% to $74.4 billion in 2026. Amazon and Walmart’s combined share: 88%.
We see this concentration as a dependency risk: how freely can brands respond when prices and rules change?
Consider a hypothetical brand allocating 70% of its $1 million annual advertising budget to one network. If maintaining the same volume there becomes 10% more expensive, annual costs rise $70,000. With sales and other expenses unchanged, profit falls accordingly.
We assess budgets through three questions:
- Dependency: What share of total advertising spend depends on one network’s decisions?
- Incrementality: How many attributed sales would have happened without advertising? Controlled tests can assess this.
- Flexibility: If spending falls, what would replacing the lost incremental profit through other channels cost?
The same questions apply to marketplace advertising in Türkiye.
For Sellf, growth engineering ties budget increases to proven incremental profit and manageable dependency.
At your next budget meeting, can you quantify the profit impact of your largest network costing 10% more?