Sam’s Club shows how in-store retail media should really work

That isn’t what we’re seeing in the broader retail market, to say the least. According to a new report from Emarketer, "In-Store Retail Media 2025," in-store retail media ad spending won’t cross the $1 billion threshold until 2029 — a milestone the industry once expected to reach in 2028. Growth has built more slowly than anticipated despite advertiser demand, with roughly one in four ad buyers citing difficulty accessing in-store reach as a top challenge. The infrastructure and capital investment required to scale these programs remain daunting, and many retailers struggle to move beyond pilot purgatory.

Sam’s Club took a different path, taking a big bet on a media channel that it could uniquely build and defend. The company has invested significantly in technology, shopper experiences, and measurement capabilities that let them prove what’s working at the individual member level. Ma’s philosophy cuts through the noise: “Advertising exists to sell more things.“

From parking lots to point-of-sale

Sam’s Club’s approach to in-store retail media actually starts outside the four walls. A few weeks ago, I covered their IndyCar sponsorship activation—a “Race to the Club” event series that brought race car simulators, prize wheels, and brand partner activations to club parking lots ahead of the season finale in Nashville. These weren’t brand awareness plays. They were member acquisition and engagement moments with measurable outcomes tied directly to membership sign-ups and in-club purchases.

The events worked because Sam's Club treated them as part of a “retail experience network” rather than isolated marketing stunts. Vizio sold TVs out of their branded RV in the parking lot. ePro demonstrated vacuum cleaners with live spill-and-clean demos. Member’s Mark, Tyson, Fanttik, and Clearly Canadian all activated within the Sam’s Club ecosystem, coordinated by the retailer rather than each brand negotiating sponsorship independently.

This orchestrator model matters because it shows how retailers can monetize their physical footprint beyond traditional ad placements. Ma told me the events generated strong NPS scores and that advertiser demand exceeded available partnership slots. Every touchpoint fed data back into Sam’s Club’s longitudinal measurement system. They can now connect a parking-lot engagement to a basket scan days later—and ultimately to what that member buys over the year.

Now Sam’s Club is scaling these activations, targeting 5X growth in large-scale events for 2026. But the real test is what happens once you’re through the doors.

Matching format to function

Emarketer’s research emphasizes that in-store placements aren’t interchangeable. Different formats serve different purposes, and retailers need to match technology choices to shopper behavior and category context. Sam’s Club demonstrates this principle in practice.

Walk into the club with the Scan & Go app open, and you’re immediately served contextual ads based on your location and member profile. The exit technology uses computer vision to verify your cart contents against your scanned items—no unloading, no friction, just walk out.

For members who’ve never used Scan & Go before, that first frictionless exit becomes a conversion moment for the technology itself. (Ma noted that their “zillennial” demographic—Gen Z and younger millennials—shows the highest Scan & Go penetration, because they’re impatient and don’t want to wait in lines. Despite being an older millennial, I felt seen.) In some locations, Sam’s Club pilots dynamic messaging on exit arch screens that can serve dynamic content and welcome first-time members by name.

Screens appear throughout the club at strategic moments, including the entrance, pharmacy waiting areas, the cafe, and checkout exits (see images below). Screens appear at strategic secondary locations — such as endcaps and checkout – where SMG research shows that placements drive nearly 90% SKU lift for new product launches, compared with 36% for average campaigns.

Ma pointed out the autonomous floor scrubber roaming the aisles of the Club. It isn’t just cleaning – it’s gathering thousands of signals per second through computer vision, monitoring traffic patterns, dwell time, and out-of-stock conditions. All of that feeds into merchandising and advertising optimization capabilities.

Sam’s Club isn’t chasing every shiny format. There are no smart carts in sight. But each format in the club has a clear purpose. They’ve brought their in-store audio programming entirely in-house, with a live DJ in Bentonville curating playlists and voiceovers that stream to all clubs. Advertisers can sponsor custom messaging and song pairings, but Ma acknowledges measurement remains difficult given the high ceilings and ambient noise. It’s an impression play, not a conversion driver.

Breaking the JBP mold

Ma’s approach challenges the traditional joint business planning cycle that has governed retailer-brand relationships for decades. Historically, merchants negotiated product assortment during JBP sessions, securing which SKUs would be on the shelves, and the conversation ended there. The merchant’s job was to get the product in; what happened next fell to someone else, or no one at all.

Sam’s Club flips this dynamic. Every JBP conversation now includes the question: what do you want to do with this item once it’s in the club? How will you bring the product to life for members? That question forces coordination between merchant teams and retail media teams from the start, breaking down the silos that plague most retail media networks. The display of Samsung washing machines we stood in front of while discussing this topic would historically have been pure shopper marketing territory. Now it's a coordinated play that extends the merchant’s work through measurable media activation.

The measurement that actually proves ROI

Most retail media networks struggle to prove in-store advertising works because they can’t connect impressions to outcomes at scale. Sam’s Club built what Ma calls their “omni impact tool” — combining multi-touch attribution with marketing mix modeling over a 12-month member journey.

“We are the first in the industry to have created an MTA (multi-touch attribution) combined with an MMM,” Ma explained. The system tracks every touchpoint a member encounters – on-site, off-site, in-club displays, audio, events – and uses AI-driven propensity modeling to determine which channels drove the most engagement and conversion. It operates at the member level with SKU-level precision, something few competitors can match.

This closed-loop deterministic measurement creates a flywheel. Brands see what works, justify spending from performance budgets that previously couldn’t touch physical retail, and Sam’s Club captures advertiser dollars that would otherwise stay in digital channels.

Ma’s team also developed what they call a “propensity predicting model” that identifies saturation points — telling brands when they’ve over-invested in a particular channel and should reallocate spend. "We also think we’re the first ones to do that too,” Ma said.

When I asked Ma what gets advertisers most excited, he pointed to the member-level, SKU-level closed-loop measurement first. Then the automation and AI that scales these insights without armies of analysts. But experiential retail media gets the most attention—creating memorable moments rather than just serving impressions.

The reality check

But here’s the catch: even if Sam’s Club executes flawlessly, in-store media won’t become the dominant revenue driver retail media networks hoped for. Emarketer’s projections are blunt – when you strip out Amazon’s massive digital dominance, in-store will represent only 3.3% of non-Amazon retail media spend by 2029.

For retailers with significant physical footprints, that 3.3% can translate into meaningful revenue – if they can execute. That’s the qualifier most retailers miss. In-store media requires more capital investment than spinning up on-site digital formats. The sales process is more complex. Organizational alignment between merchants, operations, and media teams is non-negotiable.

And the landscape keeps fragmenting. New Acosta Group data shows shoppers are visited 6.6 grocery locations in Q2 2025, up from 5.7 in Q1 2024. That dispersion makes it harder for any single grocer to claim the reach advertisers need, raising the bar even higher for execution.

Not every retailer can pull this off, which makes it a defensible advantage for those who can.

Sam’s Club has a unique positioning here. As Ma told me in an interview earlier this year, Sam’s stands on its own as both a retail operation and an RMN. But they benefit from learning from their much bigger older brother, Walmart — borrowing tech, testing approaches, and avoiding mistakes that would be expensive to make independently. That learning advantage, combined with 140 million weekly US store visits and a membership model that enables closed-loop measurement, creates conditions most retailers can’t replicate.

Getting past pilot purgatory

Sam's Club’s willingness to invest early and widely stands in sharp contrast to the industry pattern. According to Grocery Doppio research, 86% of grocers say their print circulars, digital media networks, and in-store media networks remain completely siloed or only partially integrated. About two-thirds of advertisers want connected strategies across retail media, loyalty, and merchant teams, but most retailers haven't figured out the organizational alignment required to deliver it.

Sam’s Club moved aggressively to solve this. Their growth team sits within merchandising, reporting to merchant leadership, which forces retail media activations to align with core business objectives rather than operating as a separate profit center. Every JBP conversation now includes questions about how to activate products through media once they’re on the floor.

For years, retailers have hyped the potential of in-store retail media. With 91.5% of food and beverage sales still happening in physical stores and advertisers demanding access to those shoppers, the opportunity is attractive. But the projections that in-store retail media will grow to just 1.1% of total retail media spend by 2029 raise an obvious tension: massive transaction volume, but limited advertising scalability.

Sam’s Club is showing it can be done – if you have the scale, the membership model that enables deterministic measurement, and the advantage of learning from a larger sibling’s retail media playbook. For retailers without those advantages, the infrastructure investment might not pencil out. In-store media will remain a fraction of retail media spending, but for the right retailers, it’s a fraction worth fighting for.