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Best Buy is betting big on an expansion of its ad partnerships capability, according to Modern Retail's Mitchell Parton, as it embarks in an aggressive new direction with the launch of its planned "takeover packages" in 2026.
Starting next year, Best Buy will be pitching a new idea to advertisers: These takeover packages will involve ad partners to appear in-store, interior as well as exterior placements being involved, over a month-long time frame. Windows, entrances, physical displays, TV walls, PC monitor displays, checkout counters, and interactive screens are all slated to be leveraged by interested parties looking to partner with the tech retailer for better visibility.
"The takeovers will not add new screens but will allow the general ability for brands to fully own most of the store and leverage existing screens or physical assets in new ways, the company said. There are new opportunities for advertisements on existing digital screens in Geek Squad areas, store pickup, and the POS system and digital screens in the mobile department," Parton outlined.
Lisa Valentino, president of Best Buy Ads, told the outlet that Best Buy had been fielding numerous questions from advertisers regarding the potential leveraging of the retailer's extensive brick-and-mortar footprint to best advantage -- and further, that the takeover packages would be welcoming not only to brands found in-store, but also any interested parties who believe Best Buy's consumer could be a good fit for their product or service (QSRs, automotive brands, video game companies, and theatrical or streaming titles explicitly being mentioned).
“We’ve spent the last several months really thinking about what kind of real estate we can unlock and assemble, and so, today we’re going to unveil that for the market,” Valentino said.
“Looking at just some of the playbooks of some of our other RMN brethren, we want to be as flexible and as open for business across categories as possible," she added.
With Best Buy having done 3,000 campaigns as a retail media network in 2024, with projections showing an anticipation that figure will double this year, it seems the opportunity for further company growth through ad partnerships could be on the table.
Best Buy's Ad Placements, Demographic Attractive to Advertisers (But Will a Move Toward Non-Traditional Methods Work?)
With Best Buy's exec, Valentino as well as CMO Jennie Weber, weighing in to say that the ad placements tell a sequential story, have measurable impact on awareness and attention spans, and are dynamic -- pointing to the Switch 2 midnight launch as an example of a highly successful campaign -- a focus on non-endemic (or seemingly disconnected, or tangentially connected) partners is also emerging.
“We’ve gotten questions from, ‘Can we put a car in your store?’ to ‘Can we offer quick-service discounts?’ … Ninety-three percent of a lot of big quick-service restaurants are in a one-mile radius of a Best Buy,” Valentino said.
“And so, we have this opportunity to think about all the ways in which we can bring these products to life,” she added.
One double-edged sword regarding a traditional focus on partnerships with endemic brands or companies, according to Andrew Lipsman of Media, Ads + Commerce? The fact that you're constraining your potential set of advertising collaborators, something which it appears Best Buy is attempting to hurdle despite a tech-centric consumer base.
“That specificity can be a blessing and a curse,” Lipsman said.
“It’s a blessing because it’s high-relevance for those who are typically going to advertise there, but the downside is simply that it’s not as wide a set of advertisers — hence why creating this non-endemic opportunity is so critical. Otherwise, if your growth remains strictly from endemic advertisers, then it limits the potential you really have to grow by growing those accounts,” he added.
As for Valentino, a former Disney executive, creativity and impact are the key drivers to pushing this foray into non-traditional ad campaign territory.
“There are different ways we can attach assets to make this really feel impactful and big. We do think it’s going to inspire a higher level of creativity with brands … doing something that is award-winning from a creative standpoint and really breaks through,” she said.