Ads are coming to Best Buy stores — including on entrances, walls and checkout counters

Beginning next year, Best Buy will offer “takeover packages” to allow advertisers to appear throughout the in-store shopping experience, the company said Tuesday as part of its first-ever Best Buy Ads showcase event. Separately from the takeover piece, the company also announced new partnerships on campaigns with the NFL, TMRW Golf League and Dude Perfect, though it declined to share any further details on what those campaigns entail. It also said it will roll out new channels for measurement and self-service reporting features over the next year, aimed at allowing brands to better track results and optimize campaigns.

The store takeovers will allow brands to appear throughout a store’s footprint, interior and exterior, over a 30-day period — such as on windows, the entrance, physical displays, TV walls, PC displays, interactive screens and checkout counters. The takeovers will not add new screens but will allow the general ability for brands to fully own most of the store and leverage existing screens or physical assets in new ways, the company said. There are new opportunities for advertisements on existing digital screens in Geek Squad areas, store pickup, and the POS system and digital screens in the mobile department.

Lisa Valentino, president of Best Buy Ads, told Modern Retail that this comes as Best Buy has gotten many questions from advertisers on how they can use the retailer’s thousands of stores to their advantage. She said the program will be open to both brands found in stores as well as non-endemic brands, which could include theatrical or streaming titles, quick-service restaurants, video games or automotive brands. The opportunity will also be open to third-party sellers from the company’s new online marketplace that launched this summer who want an in-store presence through advertising.

“We’ve spent the last several months really thinking about what kind of real estate we can unlock and assemble, and so, today we’re going to unveil that for the market,” Valentino said. “Looking at just some of the playbooks of some of our other RMN brethren, we want to be as flexible and as open for business across categories as possible.”

The in-store takeovers will add new real estate for campaigns to play on and allow the entire store — from the TV wall to the PC monitors — to work together in concert, Valentino said. Best Buy did 3,000 campaigns as an RMN last year and expects to double that this year, according to Valentino, driven by an in-house creative agency and 70,000-square-foot creative hub called Best Buy Studios, which opened in 2023.

The ad placements “can all be telling a sequential story as consumers come into the store, and we want to help enable that creatively,” Valentino said.

Best Buy’s Chief Marketing Officer, Jennie Weber, describes the in-store takeovers as a top-of-funnel asset that drives brand awareness. “The advertisers will really sense that the consumers are seeing their ads,” Weber said in an interview. “It is right in the customer journey, so it helps them really make decisions.”

Weber added that, through studies of the customer experience, she believes the company has a good sense of what would be a distraction or interrupt the shopping journey.

“The placements in the store are really curated to actually enable and improve that customer experience,” Weber said, adding that the goal is to prioritize the customer experience and layer this on in a way that meets the needs of advertisers. “For example, we keep our sight lines really clear. The signage that we’re adding doesn’t disrupt that. We make sure we’ve got really clear wayfinding for customers when they walk in; this package does not disrupt that.”

Of course, measurability is key for brands to determine the success of retail media activations. In-store is no exception, though it can be more difficult to measure, said Milena Krasteva, head of product for Best Buy Ads. She said the company will look at how many units were sold as well as any other metrics that non-endemic brands may be interested in. For example, movie studios may want to track ticket sales or restaurant chains may want to track app downloads.

“It’s not just about making sure the experience was meaningful, but it’s also about making sure that it was impactful,” Krasteva told Modern Retail. “Whether you’re buying awareness, consideration or performance, it’s all about performance, at the end of the day.”

Additionally, the retailer will offer the opportunity for advertisers to be visible in the area of the store where customers pick up items. According to Valentino, 30-40% of all online sales are picked up in stores. One example of a recent large-scale activation that both relates to pickup and demonstrates how Best Buy can work with brands was the Nintendo Switch 2 launch in June. Valentino said because 70% of its Switch 2 preorders wanted to pick up from the store, the stores held midnight releases for the first time in years. The company also brought in gaming trucks where gamers could try the new console.

The midnight releases “became a huge social frenzy,” Valentino said. “The amount of buzz we got socially was unexpected. I think it blew past all of our expectations, but it was also a huge payoff for Nintendo.”

Best Buy execs believe this demonstrates how the company hopes to be collaborative with brands and with non-endemic advertisers.

“We’ve gotten questions from, ‘Can we put a car in your store?’ to ‘Can we offer quick-service discounts?’ … Ninety-three percent of a lot of big quick-service restaurants are in a one-mile radius of a Best Buy,” Valentino said. “And so, we have this opportunity to think about all the ways in which we can bring these products to life.”

The big difference between Best Buy’s and other retail media networks is the specificity of the company’s consumer electronics-focused audience, said retail media analyst Andrew Lipsman of Media, Ads + Commerce.

“That specificity can be a blessing and a curse,” Lipsman said. “It’s a blessing because it’s high-relevance for those who are typically going to advertise there, but the downside is simply that it’s not as wide a set of advertisers — hence why creating this non-endemic opportunity is so critical. Otherwise, if your growth remains strictly from endemic advertisers, then it limits the potential you really have to grow by growing those accounts.”

In the non-endemic realm, Valentino — who has roots in film as a former Disney executive — imagines a hypothetical large-scale activation around a new, big action movie that could tap into the 100 million members of Best Buy’s loyalty programs. The activation could give members behind-the-scenes content or special offers, in addition to the physical, in-store activations.

“There are different ways we can attach assets to make this really feel impactful and big,” she said. “We do think it’s going to inspire a higher level of creativity with brands … doing something that is award-winning from a creative standpoint and really breaks through.”