How Best Buy aims to woo advertisers in a crowded and competitive RMN marketplace
By Kimeko McCoy • September 19, 2025 •
Ivy Liu
Best Buy Ads hosted its first ever upfront-style event this week. Although it was livestreamed and there were no splashy performances from Lizzo or Snoop Dogg (both of which performed at Amazon’s upfront and NBCUniversal’s upfront this year, respectively), the retailer is hoping its new offerings are enough to catch advertisers’ attention — and ad spend.
It’s been a busy season for the tech retailer. At its “We Got Next” livestreamed event, Best Buy Ads announced its new ad format, “takeover packages” to allow advertisers to appear in stores, touted a roadmap for its self-service capabilities and recently inked off-site partnerships. Amazon, The Home Depot and Tesco all host a similar annual event for their respective retail media networks as more retailers get into upfront-style affairs.
All of this is aimed at courting advertisers ahead of the holiday shopping season and win dollars early before advertisers lock in Q1 2026 budgets. Significant joint business planning is expected at the top of next year, making Q4 “a really important planning season that we want to be in front of with our partners,” said Lisa Valentino, president of Best Buy Ads.
It never hurts to start early, given that the retail media landscape has nearly 300 RMNs, according to retail media intelligence platform Mimbi. Competition is getting stiffer as marketers are more hesitant than ever to commit too much too early.
Best Buy Ads has been beefing up its offering as of late, adding capabilities and partnerships. In addition to the takeover ads, Best Buy recently launched a third-party marketplace (which Amazon and Walmart also have), opening up ads to mom-and-pop shops, and struck a partnership with Dude Perfect, a sports and entertainment content creator group. Notably, RMNs have increasingly started trying to monetize creator networks and affiliate programs to take in more ad spend.
There’s also a bigger push to attract advertising from non-endemic brands, including automotive, finance and gaming, understanding the Best Buy shopper may be prospective customers for these categories.
Regardless of the new bells and whistles from Best Buy Ads, media buyers seem more concerned with measurement and insight.
“Creating simpler and more streamlined ways to buy inventory with retailers is increasingly important,” said Anthony Costanzo, chief analytics officer at independent media agency Mile Marker. “Even within one retailer there’s often a hodge-podge of activation methods — self-serve, managed service, etc. with reporting and delivery data fragmented across systems.”
Best Buy Ads joins The Home Depot, which hosted its first ad showcase last year, in hosting events to woo advertisers and secure ad dollars ahead of big spending seasons. It’s a similar approach to upfronts, NewFronts, PlayFronts and other industry happenings to get in front of ad buyers and forge partnerships.
For Best Buy Ads, offering more self-service tools to advertisers — especially for off-site and non-owned media channels — is “going to be an evolution,” said Best Buy Ads head of product, Milena Krasteva. Some self-service options already exist via Best Buy’s My Ads, its self-service campaign platform that allows advertisers to purchase, plan, view and manage select campaigns. For media buys, like its store takeover offering, it’s more of a managed service, at least for now, according to Krasteva. “You might not get the report for in store in My Ads, but that’s what we’ll add. You’ll get your full reporting, obviously, on a managed service, but some of it is already available to you in My Ads,” she said.
As it stands, advertisers are partnering with multiple retail media networks. At Mile Marker, clients are activating on 10-plus platforms with plans to increase that figure in the coming year with “double digit percent growth” in terms of RMN ad spend this year, Costanzo said, declining to offer specific spend figures.
In comparison to RMN behemoths, namely Amazon and Walmart, Best Buy’s offering still feels new in terms of brand-building tools for storytelling, according to Nicholas Amos, senior ad specialist at BTR Media, a retail media ad partner.
“The biggest opportunity for Best Buy is their ability to bridge online, offline, and offsite touchpoints with their first-party data,” he said. “If they can keep scaling those newer formats while tightening up measurement and incrementality, they’ll be in a stronger position against peers in the retail media landscape.”
So maybe there’s hope yet for Best Buy Ads, though the retailer hasn’t seen a meaningful bump to break out and share its ad revenue on its earnings calls.
As Costanzo put it, “One of the biggest challenges in the space right now is the level of fragmentation in how campaigns can be deployed … Retailers’ ability to streamline the buying, activation, and measurement processes are welcomed.”
