Inside Best Buy’s first ad showcase as it makes a major play for retail media budgets

“If another retailer or another RMN wants to work with us to build out a data set of customers that might purchase across multiple retailers, we’re all in,” Valentino tells me in an interview.

This stands in sharp contrast to the walled-garden approach dominating retail media today, where over 200 networks compete for advertiser attention while brands struggle to manage relationships with an average of just six platforms.

The platform play: moving beyond traditional boundaries

What does this kind of platform look like? The company sees itself as potential infrastructure for other commerce players – possibly even other electronics retailers – to leverage for data collaboration and audience extension.

“We think we can partner with anybody who has a commerce presence,” Valentino explains. Those may include retailers, quick-serve restaurants and transport companies. The logic makes sense: by creating mechanisms for cross-retailer collaboration, Best Buy could help solve one of retail media’s most persistent challenges – the inability for brands to efficiently plan and measure campaigns across multiple retail environments.

Amazon has also begun pursuing a platform strategy with its Amazon Retail Ads Service, announcing several retail partnerships at launch and adding Macy’s more recently. Yet skepticism remains about how sustainable that model is, given that Amazon competes directly in nearly every category. Best Buy, by contrast, is a category retailer. That focus may make it a more welcome partner for others in retail media who see Amazon less as a collaborator and more as a competitor.

Learning from past partnership success

The company’s track record suggests this collaborative vision isn’t just talk. Its April 2024 partnership with CNet created a unique commerce-media model where advertisers can share ad spaces across both platforms. With a combined reach of 50 million unique visitors monthly, the partnership showed early success – 86% of consumers in an in-store test said CNet’s content made them more confident in tech purchases, with a 25% lift in purchase intent.

Similarly, their Microsoft collaboration on the ‘AI That’ campaign demonstrated sophisticated cross-platform execution, with nine vendor partners and 50+ creative executions across display, digital video, search, social and in-store. These partnerships hint at Best Buy’s ability to orchestrate complex, multi-party collaborations – exactly what a platform play would require.

Balancing standards with innovation

Best Buy is also wrestling with a tension facing every retail media network: how to comply with emerging industry standards while maintaining flexibility for innovation.

Mirena Krasteva, vice-president of Best Buy Ads Product, frames this challenge practically: “As part of the upfronts, we’re committing to IAB and MRC accreditation. We believe in standards. But we also know that as part of innovation, we’re going to deliver non-standard things because we want to be able to bring net-new opportunities to our brand partners.”

In January 2024, the IAB and the Media Rating Council (MRC) published the Retail Media Measurement Guidelines, giving the industry a framework for measuring onsite, offsite, online and in-store retail media. But adoption of standards across the industry has been slow. Best Buy’s approach, committing to standards for core metrics while preserving flexibility for experimental formats, could become a model for others.

“We will always flag when something is non-standard,” Krasteva says. “We also recognize that over time, as the industry catches up, things that are non-standard today could become standard tomorrow.”

Building infrastructure that actually works

Best Buy’s platform vision requires serious technical investment – a factor that’s increasingly showing up on buy-side priority lists. A poll of brand-side media buyers that I conducted last month found that the majority of brands say a retailer’s technology stack influences their advertising spending decisions. Yet most retailers treat their tech choices like state secrets.

Best Buy appears to be taking a different path. Best Buy shared that it is now integrating with three DSPs (Trade Desk, DV360 and Yahoo DSP). Extending access through these platforms could not only attract more advertisers to Best Buy but also allow it to tap into elusive ‘brand’ budgets from these buyers. A survey of media buyers by commerce platform Koddi earlier this year found that 96% of buyers say they “will certainly or will consider buying on-site media via a DSP” and 93% would shift non-retail budgets into retail media if they could do so programmatically.

“Investing in a first-class technology and a product platform is critical,” notes Krasteva. The company’s data collaboration capabilities will enable brands to upload their first-party data for audience matching and insights – table stakes for modern retail media but still lacking at many networks.

The retail-to-media transformation

The announcement signals Best Buy’s evolution from a retailer with an ad business to a company that sees media as core to its identity. The ‘We Got Next’ branding (above) deliberately echoes the language of traditional media upfronts, while the scale of the announcement – featuring partnerships across streaming, social and in-store retail media – demonstrates institutional commitment beyond what most retailers have shown.

This transformation reflects a broader tension I’ve observed across the retail media landscape: the challenge of aligning traditional merchandising priorities with media business ambitions. Many retailers still struggle with internal alignment between their core retail operations and their lucrative but culturally different media businesses.

Best Buy appears to be confronting this challenge directly. “We really do have ambitions to grow our offsite to be meaningfully larger than our onsite,” Valentino told me, noting that while specific targets aren’t public, the company aims for offsite to represent the majority of revenue in the years ahead.

Practical questions about collaboration

Best Buy’s platform vision raises practical questions about the future of retail media. If successful, it could push change from today’s fragmented landscape of competing walled gardens toward a more interconnected ecosystem where retailers collaborate on data and infrastructure while competing on merchandising and customer experience.

For brands exhausted by managing dozens of disparate retail media relationships, Best Buy’s approach could hint at what might work better. But success will require other retailers to embrace a level of openness that has been missing from the retail media landscape thus far.

As Valentino puts it: “We’re not going to put boundaries on this because I think boundaries cause limitations in how far we can go.”

The real test will be whether other retailers agree – and whether Best Buy can deliver the technical infrastructure and trust required to make cross-retailer collaboration actually work.