WHAT HAPPENED?
Retailers are no longer just using their websites or apps to show ads, they are turning their physical, brick-and-mortar stores into digital ad spaces.
Walmart, Walgreens, Kroger and other major retailers are expanding advertising across physical stores through digital screens, in-store placements and other addressable formats.
Walmart is also connecting its commerce-media business with channels such as connected TV through VIZIO and Vibe.co.
This is turning the store itself into a media surface.
1. WHAT ACTUALLY CHANGED
Retailers already know a lot about what customers buy through loyalty programs, ecommerce activity and transaction data.
Now they can increasingly combine that information with media inside the physical store.
That can include:
Entrance and aisle screens
Digital endcaps
Checkout displays
In-store audio
Connected TV and off-site media
Kroger, for example, already describes its retail-media business as spanning search, display, social, connected TV and in-store placements.
The industry is also developing common measurement standards because in-store media remains harder to compare than conventional digital advertising
2. WHY IT MATTERS FOR ADVERTISERS
The important shift is simple:
Retail media used to mean reaching someone while they were shopping online.
In-store media gets much closer to the actual shelf.
A beverage brand can potentially advertise inside the retailer, reach a shopper near the category and then use retailer purchase data to understand what happened afterwards.
That makes retail media less like an ecommerce placement and more like full-funnel commerce media.
3. Here’s an Explainer!
Imagine a snack brand launching a new product.
It runs connected-TV advertising through a retailer's media network, sponsored placements online and digital screens near the snack aisle.
The retailer can then connect those exposures with actual purchases.
The interesting question becomes less:
How many people clicked?
And more:
Did exposed shoppers actually buy more product?
THE SIGNAL
4. WHAT ADVERTISERS SHOULD DO
Use in-store retail media as a signal for online placement strategy.
If certain products or messages perform better at specific moments in the physical shopping journey, use that insight to test where they should appear online, across search results, product pages, recommendation modules or checkout-adjacent placements.
The goal is not to copy in-store behavior exactly.
It is to use retail media data to make better placement decisions across the full commerce journey.
ORBIT. TODAY’s TAKE
In-store retail media matters because it gives advertisers another signal for where products, offers and messages perform best, and that learning can increasingly inform placement decisions across the online retail journey too.