Best Buy is beefing up its retail media offerings to make better use of its 1,000 physical stores and the products within it, Lisa Valentino, President of Best Buy Ads told Chief Marketer.
The retail chain hosted a showcase this week for media and advertisers touting the benefits of its retail media network Best Buy Ads. Plus, it announced new features, such as its store takeover ad spots, partnerships with popular demand service platforms and expanding its self-service reporting platform.
Advertisers can takeover Best Buy stores
“One of the big asks we’ve gotten over the last year is how do I take advantage of the fact that you have a thousand stores across the country? How do you enable that from an advertising standpoint?” Valentino said.
As a consumer electronic brands, Best Buy has an abundance of screens throughout its store from its TV wall to PC monitors, making in-store ad spots easier to scale. Now brands — both ones that sell products in its stores and non-endemic brands — can advertise on these screens and throughout Best Buy stores including screens outside the store, at checkout, at online order pickup, on physical displays, on the Geek Squad line queuing board and in its mobile department.
Previously, Best Buy used these in-store screens to market its own brands. Best Buy sold some outside advertising, but not everywhere. This is the first time advertisers can buy the entire store packaged together.
“It really allows a brand to immerse our customers inside of a message or an experience,” Valentino said. “Think about the unveiling of a studio title. It could be a car launch, it could be an endemic brand, unboxing a new product, et. cetera.”
Best Buy hunts for big fish
Valentino’s examples hint at the retailer’s goal to land large non-tech advertisers on its platform.
“93% of all Starbucks and McDonald’s are within a one-mile radius of a Best Buy. Think about that, married to a huge percentage of our consumers opt to pick up in store,” Valentino said. “What an opportunity to present offer-based messaging in those very specific moments.”
Valentino said Best Buy is testing one of these larger brands, but declined to reveal more. Best Buy touts that shoppers pick up 40% of online orders in stores, which drives foot traffic.
As of 2025, Best Buy Ads has had more than 600 advertisers and conducted 3,000 campaigns. Many of those campaigns are developed with Best Buy’s in-house creative department, which is a 70,000-square-f00t studio in Minneapolis. Next year it aims to double the number of campaigns. It will achieve this from advertiser growth, adding these new spots, plus the recent launch of its marketplace, which adds a significant number of sellers interested in buying ads on BestBuy.com.
“We closed our largest non-endemic deal last week in the financial services category, and I expect next year to be a very big year for us across those non-endemic categories that we believe are adjacent to a tech consumer,” she said.
In Best Buy’s most recent earnings call for it fiscal Q2 2026, CEO Corie Barry said this will be a pivotal year for Best Buy Ads as it takes the retail media network to the next level, according to a SeekingAlpha transcript.
“We expect growth in ad collections to benefit our gross profit rate in fiscal ’26,” Barry told investors. “From an operating income rate perspective, we expect a neutral impact due to the investments we are making in technology and talent.”
Best Buy Ads’ value proposition
Many mass merchants, discount stores, grocers and specialty retailers like Best Buy are tapping into retail media as an added revenue source. Each platform proclaims its benefits, scale and unique value to advertisers. Best Buy touts:
- 93% of transaction revenue tracked to a customer ID
- More than 10 billion website page views annually
- 65 million annual transactions
- 200 million customers, which is 80% of U.S. adults
- 11 million unique mobile app users
- 100 million members across three membership tiers, including 8 million paid members
- On average, advertisers experience a sales lift of 36% and 3.75-times return on investment
“The fact that we can tie 93% of all transactions that happen online and offline to a customer ID is a secret weapon that doesn’t exist outside of retail media and performance media,” Valentino said.
Best Buy also announced at its showcase that advertisers can buy spots within Best Buy’s network through the major demand service platforms, including The Trade Desk, DV360 and Yahoo DSPs, and more standard ways to buy programmatically, said Milena Krasteva, head of product at Best Buy Ads.
“We have to recognize that there will be customers who want to buy through established interfaces, so our audiences are becoming available in DSPs,” Krasteva said.
Getting CMOs to pay attention to retail media
Valentino is coming up on her one year anniversary at Best Buy Ads after holding executive positions at The Walt Disney Co., Condé Nast and ESPN. Her focus over the past few months has been getting chief marketing officers to pay attention to the business problems that Best Buy can solve.
And the advertising community is leaning in, she said. She points to a recent campaign that Best Buy did with Microsoft called “AI That” as an example of success. The spot promoted Microsoft’s AI product Co-Pilot and ran it across C-TV, social, in-store and its website.
“Customers need AI humanized. And so we took that signal from our data graph and we brought it to Microsoft and we said, we have the makings of a very large marketing platform that Microsoft can own in their desire to keep pushing Copilot,” Valentino said.
The campaign was a success and it plans to bring it back next year, she said without reveling specifics.
“That was supported by this most senior leadership at Microsoft, including the CMO, including the shopper marketing teams, including their ad agency,” she said. “That was a very big signal to me that that is best-in-class when we can cut across all of the budgets and the opportunities and we can help solve that problem. And we did it in a really performative way. … And it’s happening beyond one category. It’s happening beyond one account.”
Network
