Volatility is a Wall Street investor’s worst enemy—and it’s the stomach-churning status quo in 2026. Consider a lead generation firm in which Solomon Partners was a major investor. For years, the company’s annual revenue exceeded multiple hundreds of million dollars, but in a mere 12 months, its yearly haul plummeted to under $50 million. 

“It’s a scary world out there for an investor in media and tech these days,” admitted Mark Boidman, Partner and Head of Media & Entertainment Investment Banking at Solomon, to a packed audience at NRF 2026, as he recounted the high-flying company’s sudden plunge.

Speaking at “The Store as a Media Asset” session at the What’s in Store for Retail Media Networks event at this year’s NRF. Mark came to give a Wall Street insider’s outlook on in-store digital to 550 retail media professionals. Heading into the new year, the crowd—retail media leaders, brand advertisers and agency strategists—had a pressing front-of-mind question: Is in-store investment justified among a plethora of retail media options?

Mark’s answer: In-store is not just a sound investment today but, in the long term, among the best bets an investor can make. In-store retail media, he argued, has emerged as what investment analysts are calling a “durable asset class” at a time when nearly every other media channel faces existential threats from technology.

 

Technology: The Store’s Friend, Not Foe

At NRF 2026, Mark’s message from Wall Street was simple: In-store media is the only advertising channel where technology is actually building value, not eroding it.

“Technology is only a friend to what we call out-of-home media,” he explained, echoing what he’s hearing from investors across the industry, name-checking out-of-home (OOH) screens in retail stores, taxi seatbacks, elevators and gas stations. “If you think about your mobile phone or television, they’re not immune to what’s happening in technology.”

His blunt prediction? “At some point, all ads, in my opinion, will be blocked on your mobile phone. But in the physical world, you can’t block it or skip it. That’s why we love OOH.”

Media spending forecasts support his optimism.. U.S. in-store retail media ad spending is expected to climb 33.1% in 2026, according to EMARKETER, which projects in-store retail media spend will cross $1 billion by 2029—a nearly three-fold increase from 2024 levels.

In a world where the average person is inundated with 10,000 messages per day, Wall Street investors see in-store media as having a decisive structural advantage.

Mark told the NRF audience that Solomon Partners recently commissioned a study that quantified what media channels had the greatest impact on consumers. Out-of-home media—including retail in-store screens—achieved 86% ad recall, the highest rate among all advertising channels.

 

Measurement Moves the Needle

To date, the impact of in-store media on incremental sales has been hard to prove, but in-store measurement technology has evolved rapidly and is winning far greater adoption among retailers than ever before. Companies like Albertsons, CVS and Target are proving sales lift from in-store screens. Once measurement fully develops—and investors say it will—it will show that retail media beats social media.

“Five years ago, these companies had no way to prove the lift,” Mark told the NRF session. “Today, the attribution piece is getting solved, which is a game changer.”

Once in-store measurement is fully mature, it will draw a stark contrast between the impact of in-store digital media and social media ads, the distinction being prediction versus purchase certainty, in Solomon Partners’ view. 

Yes, social media offers massive scale, he noted. Facebook and YouTube still dwarf retail media in pure audience numbers. But social operates on predictive modeling of whether an ad impression may or may not convert to an actual sale. “When you’re on social media, you’re not necessarily in purchase mode,” Mark emphasized.

But in-store is different. “When you’re in a store, you’re usually there having done some research potentially already. You already know what you want,” he notes. This is where “purchase certainty” becomes critical. Shoppers in stores aren’t potentially interested consumers. They’re active buyers at the moment of decision. In-store advertising isn’t about creating awareness; it’s about influencing final choice.

 

First-Party Data Is the New ‘Cookie’

Five years ago, brands asked ad agencies where to spend money. But today “the ad agencies know less about the consumers in a store than the store does,” says Mark.

That’s the first-party data advantage. Thanks to robust loyalty programs, retailers don’t just know browsing behavior. They know actual purchase history, shopping frequency, basket composition, demonstrated preferences. This data infrastructure makes in-store retail media resistant to the privacy regulations and cookie deprecation that have destabilized digital advertising.

And while investment banks are projecting that the retail media sector overall will continue to see double-digit growth, Wall Street sees in-store specifically as the next frontier.

“We cover most of the companies in the Fortune 500. As we’re having conversations with them, we’re hearing that the focus has turned to in-store,” Mark revealed. 

What’s changed? Five years ago, major retailers told investment bankers they weren’t focused on in-store spending. They preferred loyalty apps and e-commerce infrastructure.

But those priorities are shifting as retailers see compelling data is starting to prove that in-store media drives incremental purchases. And, no matter how economic volatility and the evolving influence of agentic AI impact consumer behavior, in-store isn’t going away, with 80% of retail spending still occurring in physical stores, according to EMARKETER.

In Wall Street’s purview, that figure is a testament to the permanence of the physical shopping experience. For analysts and investors alike, that durability is looking increasingly attractive.