Best Buy, Sam’s Club and Nordstrom executives share big plans for their ad businesses at Shoptalk

Best Buy has long had an advertising business but relaunched it in 2022 as an in-house media company, Best Buy Ads, to target a greater variety of potential advertisers. It now hopes to grow the business even further with a new third-party marketplace. As Valentino explained it to the audience at the Shoptalk conference in Las Vegas, Best Buy is building a new media company. She said that last year, the company worked with 600 brands on 2,000 campaigns, with every piece of creative produced by Best Buy.

“Retail media was where I wanted to go, because it really is the intersection of influence and performance,” Valentino said. “I think about all of the ways in which, at Disney, we were trying to engage the customer, the consumer, and drive action. There’s no better way to do that than in retail media, and you can bring all of the contacts along for the ride.”

Like Valentino, several other retailers told the audience of the potential they see in retail media and how they can build a deeper relationship between brands and customers. And to harness that, they are actively transforming how their businesses are structured and what they’re focusing on.

On a separate panel was Harvey Ma, vp and gm of Sam’s Club’s Member Access Platform, its retail media business. The club retailer gets to tap into 40 years of first-party membership data.

“What that means, in layman’s terms, is that virtually every interaction at the member-level is tracked,” Ma said. “We can actually capture all those interactions across very different usage types, and so that transcends itself in the retail media business.”

Nordstrom vp of media Aaron Dunford also spoke on the panel with Ma. Both Nordstrom and Sam’s Club have restructured their businesses to bring retail media capabilities under executives who oversee other connected parts of the business. Sam’s Club in February announced its first chief experience officer, Diana Marshall, who now oversees the retail media business, as well as membership, product, design, marketing and more. At Nordstrom, Dunford now oversees enterprise media, retail media and media enablement.

“The reason for that was very simple: We don’t want to have a disparate experience for the customer, and that can happen just if you sit in silos in an organizational structure,” Dunford said.

Dunford explained the future of Nordstrom’s ad business as moving from transactional to experiential.

“We started to really focus on our creative and telling that story, working on more long-story format types that are different than what you consider traditional retail media,” Dunford said.

Dunford said Nordstrom is less focused on in-store screens and is working more with brands on non-digital visual installations in stores, some recent ones being a skiing-related display and a swim shop. The retailer has especially been focusing on non-endemic brands from cruise lines and airlines to streaming services. Over the holidays, it worked with Shutterfly on a campaign with Santa breakfasts and photos.

“That’s where we’re really looking to focus: How can we double down on bettering the customer experience through companies that can serve our customer?” Dunford said, adding that the company is also pushing into connected TV.

Valentino also brought up the importance of experiences — that the one thing the company brings to CMOs and brands other than data, distribution and reach are in-person experiences.

“Best Buy is building what I think of as one of the more interesting retail media flywheels,” added retail media analyst Andrew Lipsman, who moderated the discussion with Valentino. “The components of that would be commerce, advertising and media; the media component is something that maybe retailers don’t always have or have to build out, but it’s all built on a foundation of first-party data.”

Valentino said she learned when she arrived at Best Buy that 30% of the retailer’s sales are derived online and that customers pick up 40% of those items in stores — she pointed to that large share as an indicator of how important the store experience still is to consumers.

“It’s all about creating a palette for brands to create those really important connections with consumers; that’s what media should do,” Valentino said. “I frankly think Best Buy and other retailers will check lots of those boxes going forward.”