Best Buy Ads’ Lisa Valentino on retail media’s next chapter: commerce media

And I am Ilea Slippering. Welcome to the Big Impression. This week, we're joined by Lisa Valentino, president of Best Buy Ads. She's beating AI that, a campaign with Microsoft designed to make AI-powered PCs feel practical, not abstract. That campaign uses everyday scenarios to show how tools like Copilot actually work, across media channels and in-store experiences. And that's the bigger idea. Retail media isn't just about driving, clicks is about creating moments of understanding. So today, we're exploring how brands can connect storytelling, media and physical experience into one system. So Lisa, we spoke in 2025 at CAN. Since then, curious to hear from you. What's new at Best Buy Ads? First of all, it's so great to be here with both of you. What's not new? You know, it's fun to be here at possible and see and reflect really on the last year. Our strategy has taken not only has our strategy really gelled in terms of how we're thinking about the opportunity to be an intersector of large media connected commerce and retail. And bring that to the forefront. We have hired a lot more people. We have spent quite a bit of investment building our tech stack, our partnerships. Really thinking about where innovation is going to be an accelerant for Best Buy. I know we'll talk about some of that today. But it has gone very quickly the last year. And we have so much to be proud of. We were actually awarded Commerce Platform of the Year this week, which is super exciting. And just a testament to the team that is standing shoulder to shoulder with me every day building this business. And one of the big themes that we're hearing, of course, of course it was that big theme last year at CAN. But it's getting more nuanced around it is AI. And I wanted to just sort of talk a little bit about that through the perspective of the Best Buy campaign AI that. Could we talk about that and that the role there that Best Buy wants to play in terms of humanizing perhaps the role of AI? We can. The campaign is a backdrop to why I join Best Buy. If you think about the role that AI is going to play in just human everyday life and the world that we live in, there is no better company positioned to help tell that story. That's what Best Buy does. That's what we show up to do every day. And so we can dig into the campaign with with Microsoft, which is an incredible one. But it also is the backdrop to the role that Best Buy plays in technology. Every day we enable technology for consumers. We took a very specific position with Microsoft in terms of helping them humanize. But that's what we do for all brands, you know, of all shapes and sizes every single day for millions and millions of customers, you know, that walk through our door. So that so the AI that campaign was sort of born from that premise that as AI enabled PCs were entering the market the year prior. So over a year ago, the technology is so new. You know, we are steeped in it. We're you're steeped in MarTech ad tech. But the average consumer is still on the journey of understanding. You know, and so we saw that as an opportunity and frankly a responsibility to help tell that story. Microsoft also is at a really interesting inflection point because they were sunsetting. Win 10. And so it really was this perfect storm of AI PCs entering the market. They also were transitioning their own product suite and AI that was born. And we really spent quite a bit of time with them thinking about customer, you know, in a world where there is so much technology that is rushing at customers. You know, the point the simple point is if you if you stay focused on the consumer and what they're going to need that that's really the guide for this program and so many others that we that we develop for partners. Now you're using retail media placements to drive awareness. But the store is also where people come in experience and understand the product. How do you connect those two moments? Right. AI that was a story that we told over several months across several formats. We leveraged our in store labor or blue shirts who are our ambassadors, if you will, they are the ultimate ambassadors for best by. We leveraged all of the physical capability are in store physical footprint. We leveraged data and targeting to bring that campaign to life. We leveraged social CTV. And so the every capability that we have went into telling this story on behalf of Microsoft to consumers. The store plays an incredibly important role. I love this stat that 45% on average of all e-com purchases get picked up in store. Wow. That's high. And by the way, it's even higher when you think about other categories like gaming. And it just again goes back to the consumer insight of when you when you know I when I want that product, whether it's a PC or it's a TV, I need it now. And so how do we leverage the fact that best by has a thousand stores across the country and 80,000 employees, many of which sit inside of those physical physical stores to bring that campaign to life. I want to ask about the consumer journey now. I think because you mentioned at least you mentioned that you know you see everything through the perspective or you think about things from the perspective of the consumer. I'm interested to hear a bit more about that consumer journey and how they encounter, you know, the various media from the ends, the hats in a best by store. What's that like? So it's a really good point and for for this particular project that we did, you know, bring creating these use cases around every day real life. Right. The benefits of how AI is going to make your day to day life easier, faster, more efficient, centered around family centered around different use cases where we see our customer come to life. That actually and there were social versions of that there were video versions of that there were versions of that that as we trained our labor and store they were able to practically speak to that. That's when you have magic in a bottle right where the customer on the other end can see themselves through the lens of technology. And that is the beautiful thing that came to life here and all of the different media formats play a different role right the role of CTV is really about awareness and inspiration. Whereas the role of our in store capabilities real really more about functionality. How do I touch the product see the product see that benefit that AI powered PCs can do through my own eyes. So again, I think the beauty of of a best by is and so many people don't know this about us so many customers are like I had no idea. So just the same way that that consumers we love this at best by we know we're winning when customers say I had no idea could do that on the flip side when advertisers and partners say to me and my team. I had no idea best by ads could do that I had no idea retail media could do that right we stretch so far beyond the lower funnel perform media and that's why this campaign is one now of many. Right because it's a really interesting playbook in terms of how you leverage all media how you leverage the top of the funnel and pull that all the way through to the bottom and the results you know were we're here you know for for for this particular campaign they were they were off the charts so it's great to see I would like to dig into those results a little bit more what do you feel like we're the most important outcomes. What was perhaps like expected and then maybe what was something more surprising. So with every campaign there's clarity around the accountability but to be able to see how we can deliver significant results in terms of awareness and consideration and also sell product I never have sat in a seat professionally where we could do all check all of those boxes and so some of the just the sheer volume of the campaign I think we deliver something like two billion impressions we delivered a significant amount of clicks over seven million which I think is a driver in a reflection of just how much engagement the customer had you know I know we live in a world of clicks and impressions and C.P. everything but when I look at that those ads and that story was resonating and so clients were clicking to find out more the row is on this campaign was delivered well over expected. rates. So that was really exciting to see. And it was a long campaign. You know, it lasted over several months. And so those were all really good signals. We also were optimizing this campaign along the way. And so how you also are using real time data and insights to inform, okay, what's working? How do we do more of what's working? And how do we optimize towards those? It was also a big part of it. On that point, could you give us a bit of a sense of the scale of the kind of buying signals that you see on this customer journey? Sure. I mean, we see we see quite a bit of buying signals at scale every day. We have over 200 million customers in our first party data graph. It is the secret weapon of Best Buy. In addition to our brand and our influence, we also can ascribe 93% of transactions at that size, you know, makes with us down to a customer ID. And so why is that important? It's important because we know I assume you're both Best Buy customers. We know when you're in market for new upgrade, we know if you're really interested in health and wellness tech, beauty tech. We might also be able to signal your family is growing based on some of the new technology that you're buying. So all of those signals are really the foundation of the data that we use to make our campaigns work harder for clients. Now, this, obviously, this campaign is less than a typical brand campaign that would be in market. It's more like a connected ecosystem, if you will, is that how you think about retail media now? I know it's grown a lot even in the past year or two, since you've been at Best Buy especially. How do you see it growing from this point into the future? That's true. I mean, look, we do business where running a very large scale media business today, thousands of campaigns, hundreds of customers that we're servicing and everybody has different needs. What's also really important is the technology mirrors the culture calendar. It's really interesting. I've spent a lot of my career in culture and doing a lot of storytelling around culture on behalf of brands. The biggest drive times for technology are around culture like life sports, back to school, holiday. We're coming up on Memorial Day big drive time for technology and appliances and things like that. So at different levels of scale, this happens to be a very large scale program. We're running several of these and they look different, right? They look different. We did some work with Nintendo last summer for the Switch 2. Very big moment for young gamers. We opened up all of our stores at midnight for that drop. We drove a ton of social. So every program is going to be in Demick to the customer we're trying to reach on the other end and with the ultimately what the goals are. Yeah, my son is a crazy Nintendo Switch. I thought it was in the 2. He said no daddy is number 1 but how old is it? He's 7. Exactly. Yeah. I wanted to ask you more globally now. We talk about retail media and retail media exploding. But this is bigger than retail media. What we're talking about is beyond retail media. Could you sort of characterize that and how you think about it? It's really, we were talking yesterday. We're really trying to shift the language to commerce media. Retail media I think is too small. But if you think about it and I said this in can when we did this session a year ago, it's media. It's not retail media commerce media. It's the new media. And what an opportunity now to bring a media asset to the market that is performant. It's scalable. It's influential. It's inspirational. It transcends all borders. And so that is the opportunity that we have at Best Buy but certainly there's a larger group of platforms that are engaged in that. One of the, because the landscape is so large, I know there is some unevenness there. And especially when it comes to measurement, how do you think about that? It's the next frontier. It absolutely is. I worked at Yahoo in the late 90s. I spent the first decade of my career there. And so it was a very exciting time but it was the wild wild west. If you guys remember like the digital days or the early digital days. And there were likely, like there are today 300 retail media networks. There were lots of digital companies back in the day. There were no standards. There was a lot of excitement. There was a lot of energy. There was a lot of talk about, is it too accountable as a medium? Would it ever become a huge part of the media ecosystem? We know all the answers to that. And I'm seeing a lot of the same trends in commerce media. And as an industry, and we spent a lot of time, I possible this week talking about it, how can brands like Best Buy lead more standardization around measurement? And once that happens, it will continue to drive share out of the market. And so no doubt the next 12 months for us is about multi-touch attribution work, like really advanced analytics and measurement because we can. Working with the set of partners that are going to score card this part of the business the right way. So we're all, you know, in various conversations on that front. Incrementality is a really hot topic right now. And both incrementality and MTA are on our roadmap to deliver solutions this year. It's taking a lot of our focus. It's taking a lot of our investment. And it's because brands like Microsoft and others are saying, wait, if you can prove that you can deliver all of these types of KPIs, I need to see it. So it's about proof. It's about the evidence. We'll move it, you know, because every brand and every category is under pressure to perform, right? And they're under pressure to drive attention with consumers. That's the currency is attention. And so if a brand like Best Buy says, hold on a minute, we have attention of hundreds of millions of customers every year. And we can help you tell your stories and we can help you sell your products at scale. That's the opportunity. How are you guys also adapting to the changing of technology from AI devices to connected homes? Obviously you you guys sell that yourself. But how does that then change the role of advertising within the retail environment? Sure. So the store a great example of this is when you walk into a Best Buy, it's a screen, right? It's a large screen, whether it's our TV wall, whether it's our PC monitors. And so we have such an opportunity to bring, you know, what I would call digital out of home on steroids to life. And so to your point, how are we, you'll see us this year do quite a bit of upgrade of the technology in our stores to do advanced targeting to do high impact creative to really leverage the fact that we have a thousand stores across the country. Be entertainment studios are interested in that. The gaming companies are interested are endemic partners. And so we are eating our own dog food to a certain extent, right? Because we're leveraging all of the tools and technology to advance, you know, capability like that. The screens make it that much easier. It's why when you look at even some of the partnerships, you know, we're an official partner of the NFL very intentionally, right? We know that our customer is the NFL fan. They are heavily, you know, focused on fantasy sports, college sports, professional. And so how we bring that to life, right? Those signals gaming is another one we are testing. We're doing some really interesting work with tomorrow's golf league as an example. I don't know if you guys have checked it out. It's actually in locally here in Florida. The facility is incredible. But again, that nod that sports and technology have always gone hand in hand. And so how does best by we're an enabler? That's what we are as a company. We are not making the products. We are enabling. And so we're going to keep doing that. And we're going to hopefully continue to surprise into like consumers back to that. I had no idea. It could do that. I had no idea. Best by did that. What would you say is still missing from the retail media ecosystem today? There's a couple of things that I think we talked measurement that standardized measurement, I think is really important. It's not something that's missing, but their continues to need to be education. in this space. Clients understanding not so much the should I, but more the how. Agencies, I've spent a lot of time this week with a lot of senior agency folks. It's in the corner of an agency still. Commerce media, it's needs to come to the center of the table. What's one assumption about retail media that you think is completely wrong? That it's just a performance media. It is very performant, but it can do so much more. If you could give CMOs one piece of advice about commerce media, what would it be? Think broader about the role that it can play. And what I mean by that is you think about a brand like BusBine, obviously we spend a good majority of our time with certain categories that are very endemic to what we do. But in a world where technology is unboxed every day, think about commerce media and your strategy more broadly. And finally, if you had an unlimited budget, what would you spend your money on? People in this world of AI, and I'm sure you guys have had this conversation this week, it's not a replacement, it's a compliment. And so we're going to need to continue to invest in people. We're going to continue to invest in the skills that our people have so that we are best positioned to one take advantage of the technology and two, continue to, you know, we're in the media business because it's human, creative, marketing business, and so people are going to be incredibly important in our future. And that's it for this edition of The Big Impression. This show is produced by Molten Hart, our theme is by Love and Caliber, and our associate producer is Sydney Canes. And remember, the role of CTV is really about awareness and inspiration, whereas the role of our in-store capabilities real really more about functionality. I'm Damien. And I'm Elise. And we'll see you next time.