Why Best Buy thinks the future of retail media still lives in the store

That distinction matters. Best Buy isn’t pitching its 1,000+ stores as inventory. It’s positioning them as environments – places where brands can tell stories, influence consideration and create impact in ways that increasingly crowded digital channels struggle to match.

“When you look at brands and how they think about storytelling, influence and impact,” she said, “our in-store platform is just that. There are millions of customers coming through a Best Buy experience every single day, and it’s a new way to be in front of them in a unique and creative opportunity.”

An open creative palette

Part of the appeal, Valentino argues, is creative freedom. Best Buy’s stores offer scale, but not rigidity.

“We have a creative palette to play with that runs 1,000 stores deep across the country,” she said. “You don’t have to do all of them. You can geo-target. You can be really intentional about the spaces and places you want to play. And you can bring your creativity to the table.”

That openness has attracted interest well beyond consumer electronics. Best Buy shoppers are also parents, sports fans, drivers, gamers and media consumers – overlapping audiences that many brands struggle to reach authentically.

“If you’re ESPN, which is in our stores right now, you’re looking for new ways to disrupt and have a conversation that’s authentic with the customer,” Valentino said. “In a crowded media landscape, you’re looking for white space.”

From Ikea to the World Cup

Some of Best Buy’s most ambitious in-store work has come through partnerships that rethink what belongs inside an electronics retailer.

Activations with Ikea are a case in point. “Those activations start with the audience graph,” Valentino said. “Understanding what experiences our customers would appreciate in-store is how that partnership started.”

Back-to-school, dorm life and first apartments created a natural bridge between furniture and technology, leading to “stores within stores” that go far beyond signage.

The same logic underpins Best Buy’s approach to sport and culture. “We’re excited about the World Cup this summer,” Valentino said, pointing to work with official partners across host cities. “We have stores in those cities. How do we use them to celebrate those moments in bigger ways and tell the stories of our partners?”

Sports, she added, are already deeply embedded in Best Buy’s customer base – from NFL Sundays to college football Saturdays. “How does our store reflect that?” she asked. “Sports is such a big part of who our customers are.”

That thinking also extends to creators and gaming culture, including a new partnership with Dude Perfect. “How do we use our store as a backdrop?” Valentino said. “How do we bring launches, play and community back into physical retail?”

That creative ambition is underpinned by a sizeable in-house operation that many in the industry still underestimate. Best Buy operates a roughly 75,000-square-foot creative studio – a fully equipped, state-of-the-art production facility that produces the vast majority of creative content running across its retail media network and brand ecosystem.

Valentino admitted she was “blown away” when she first saw it. “Every piece of creative that runs through the RMN and the brand runs through that creative ecosystem,” she said. Last year alone, the team produced thousands of assets to support campaigns across channels. In 2026, Best Buy plans to automate and optimise more of that output, including greater use of AI-enabled tools, while also exploring how the studio itself might be more formally branded and opened up as a strategic asset for key partners. Access to the studio, Valentino noted, is increasingly becoming a core component of Best Buy’s biggest joint business partnerships.

Measurement: the hard bit

For all the momentum, Valentino is clear-eyed about the challenges – particularly measurement.

“The piece we have to figure out for in-store is the measurement piece,” she said. Best Buy is working with partners, including Circana and Kantar, alongside geolocation and adtech providers, to build a full-funnel view.

For endemic brands, the link to sales is more straightforward. “We can do full-funnel attribution because we have a customer graph that can tie transactions wherever they happen,” Valentino said.

For non-endemic brands, the focus shifts to incrementality and brand impact. “They want to understand: how many incremental customers did I connect with? Did I move consideration? Did I drive greater awareness?”

It’s early days, she admits. “We’re really in the throes of making sure we have the right measurement blueprint.”

Rewiring the store itself

Measurement is only one part of the equation. The other is infrastructure.

“The technology in the stores has to be upgraded,” Valentino said. “You think about all the screens in a Best Buy – the TV walls, the PC monitor walls. They need to be advanced and connected.”

Best Buy is now investing in making those screens talk to each other, enabling sequential messaging as customers move through the store. “We haven’t figured it all out yet,” she said, “but you’re going to see us make really big investments this year.”

The payoff, she believes, will come over the next 12 to 18 months, as in-store experiences become more targeted, more dynamic and more measurable – without losing their physical impact.

Experiences, with permission

Perhaps the most telling moment in the conversation came when Valentino reflected on how easily retail once gave this ground away.

“One of my first meetings was with an automotive brand that asked me what the square footage of our parking lots was,” she said. “It said the next time it launched a truck, it should be doing it there.”

Gaming offers a similar lesson. Midnight launches, lines around the block, social buzz – experiences Best Buy once owned. “When Switch 2 launched, it was cool again to stand around the block,” she said. “It was a social phenomenon.”

For Valentino, that’s the signal the industry can’t ignore. “The pendulum is swinging back,” she said. “It was all digital all the time. Now you’re starting to see experiences matter again.”

Experiences, she stressed, only work when they’re authentic. “If you get it wrong, you lose,” she said. “We’re very careful about being connected to what our customers are going to find interesting and useful.”

At NRF, surrounded by talk of AI, automation and performance media, Best Buy’s argument landed quietly but firmly: the future of retail media won’t just be optimised. It will be experienced.

Commerce media is moving fast. The Drum Awards for Commerce Media are here to recognize the work keeping pace – and setting the standard. Join us in Miami in April as part of The Drum’s year-round Commerce Media program. Learn more and enter.