If you've heard "retail media" thrown around as the next big thing in advertising, here's the plain version. Retail media is advertising sold by retailers across their own channels, their websites, their apps, and, increasingly, the screens inside their physical stores. That last part overlaps directly with digital out-of-home, which is why it matters here.
The simple definition
Retailers have something advertisers want: shoppers with intent, and first-party data about what those shoppers buy. Retail media networks let brands buy ad placements across a retailer's properties to reach those shoppers close to the moment of purchase.
It spans three surfaces:
- On-site, sponsored listings and banners on the retailer's website and app
- Off-site, the retailer's audience data used to target ads elsewhere
- In-store, digital screens on shelves, endcaps, and entrances
The in-store layer is the bridge to DOOH: those screens are real-world, digital, and bought much like other out-of-home inventory.
Why it's booming
Two forces are driving retail media's explosive growth:
- Purchase proximity. Reaching a shopper steps from the shelf, or on the page where they're buying, is as close to the decision as advertising gets.
- First-party data. As third-party cookies fade and privacy rules tighten, retailers' own purchase data becomes uniquely valuable for targeting and measurement.
The result is one of the fastest-growing categories in all of advertising, expanding well beyond e-commerce giants to grocers, drugstores, and specialty chains.
How in-store retail media connects to cross-screen
For most advertisers, the practical takeaway is that in-store screens are part of the same real-world-screen opportunity as street and venue DOOH, and they work best as one layer of a cross-screen campaign, not a silo.
Picture the journey: a shopper sees your brand on a neighborhood screen, again on their living-room TV, and once more on a screen inside the store as they decide. Each touch reinforces the last, right up to the shelf.
What it means for a smaller advertiser
You don't need to be a national CPG brand to benefit from the idea behind retail media: be present where purchase decisions happen. For a local business, that means the screens in and around the places your customers shop and move, exactly the in-venue and street-level DOOH you can buy programmatically today.
Glo out of home makes those premium screens self-serve, all screens unlocked, DOOH first, CTV also, so you can put one video in front of customers across the real world and the living room, from $17/day, no contract. To see how the channels fit together, start with what cross-screen advertising is.