Best Buy Ads inverts the model: the sale, not the audience, is the north star

Best Buy Ads builds its ad products backwards from the sale. "At a commerce business, sales is the north star. As we're deciding to build a product or decide on a targeting criteria, you start to think about what people buy those products and then how do you work back up," Patrick Albano, CRO of Best Buy Ads, told Beet.TV. Most media businesses start with the audience and work down to the sale; Best Buy pairs the inverted logic with a decade of purchase history across one of the longest refresh cycles in retail. The concrete product is a connected TV format that identifies whether a consumer is months away from a buying decision or about to make one, then serves a brand ad or an offer accordingly. "If you are considering buying something in a few months, we're able to give you an ad that's a little bit more brand focused, or if you're going to buy something tomorrow, maybe it's more of an offer," Albano said.

The crux

Commerce-first inventory, where the sale is the input and the output, is outcompeting audience-first inventory on the one metric advertisers now demand: a closed loop from impression to transaction.

Sell-side read

The threat to publishers is not just retail media networks taking share; it is that they redefine what a good impression is, an impression tied to a verifiable purchase, against which audience-first inventory looks like a bet rather than a measurement. Publishers need a purchase or outcome signal of their own, or they cede the premium end of CTV.

Watch

Whether retail media networks extend closed-loop measurement beyond their own walls into third-party publisher CTV this quarter.