Big-Box Briefing: Best Buy puts CTV at the center of its retail media pitch
Best Buy is increasingly putting its electronics roots at the heart of its retail media pitch.
On Wednesday, Best Buy held its annual showcase event highlighting what’s coming up in its retail media business — including a new part of its advertising business that the company is branding as Best Buy CTV.
According to a spokesperson, Best Buy CTV is “a new offering that combines Best Buy’s first-party shopper audiences, device ownership data and purchase-intent signals with premium CTV inventory from partners,” including LG, Roku and Amazon.
For example, advertisers will now have access to advertising inventory on all new and existing Insignia TVs — the name for Best Buy’s in-house TV brand, which uses Amazon’s Fire TV as the operating system.
At the event, Best Buy also announced it is launching on TikTok Shop in late October and expanding its Best Buy Creator program. All of these announcements ladder up to one of the big goals in Best Buy’s retail media business right now, according to Best Buy’s Chief Ads and Media Officer, Lisa Valentino — that is, “finding really unique ways to aggregate supply” for its advertisers.
With Best Buy CTV, in particular, “that is a really unique solution that gets marketers thinking about Best Buy differently” — specifically, that it is an advertising business focused on more than just lower-funnel advertising placements and “can solve problems across all of [your] media.”
Valentino joined Best Buy in 2024 and, before that, spent more than five years at the Walt Disney Company. Now, she’s responsible for shaping the vision for Best Buy’s advertising business under incoming CEO Jason Bonfig, who will take over the top job at the end of October.
“One of the priorities Jason has set forth for us as an enterprise is really about how we advance Best Buy as a retail media and advertising and technology company,” Valentino said. As she put it, areas like CTV and social commerce are now capabilities required to “be an excellent media company and to fuel a large-sized business.”
Of course, adding more supply also gives retailers like Best Buy more places to sell ads and, thus, increase the money they can make through their retail media businesses. Last year, at the same advertising showcase event, Best Buy announced an in-store takeover package that advertisers could participate in.
“There is no shortage of ways that retail media networks can add supply,” said Andrew Lipsman, an independent analyst with Media, Ads + Commerce. “They can make more ad slots available in their owned media environments, on-site and in-store. And then there’s a virtually limitless supply that can be obtained via third-party media partnerships and programmatic.”
But what is often lacking, Lipsman said, is quality inventory. CTV, he said, is high-quality inventory, especially when paired with first-party shopper data — which Best Buy can offer.
As part of the Fire TV deal, Best Buy Ads will start using Amazon Ads’ programmatic technology, beginning in February 2027.
Amazon and Best Buy have had a partnership since 2018, and there are “tens of millions of homes” that have bought an Insignia TV in the last eight years, according to Valentino.
This partnership “has tremendous reach, and it is unique in that not only is it new supply for us to bring to market, but it incorporates our audience graphs, our data targeting capabilities and all of our measurement,” Valentino said. “That’s the really big differentiator in CTV.”
But that’s not the only area where advertisers will be able to access CTV inventory through Best Buy; the company also has deals with LG and Roku. For LG, advertisers will have access to inventory including the LG Home screen and CTV video inventory, marking the first time LG Home screen inventory has been available through a retail media network, according to a spokesperson.
Lipsman said Best Buy’s push into CTV reminded him of Walmart’s acquisition of Vizio, a TV maker that the retailer bought in 2024 for $2.3 billion. “The industry agrees [that] was a smart strategic move because it gave [Walmart] owned and operated supply,” Lipsman said.
On the creator front, Best Buy is evolving its creator program so advertisers can work with influencers through it. Best Buy launched its creator program last year as more of a storefront play — a program through which trusted voices in tech could curate some of their favorite Best Buy finds and earn a commission on purchases. But now, the program will also pair brands with creators who can create content for channels like TikTok Shop and CTV. A select group Best Buy retail employees — known as Best Buy Blue Shirts — will also now be part of the creator program.
When Best Buy launches on TikTok Shop, there will be nearly 10,000 products available for sale through brands like Oura, Bose, Dyson and Microsoft.
Being on TikTok Shop “allows our partners to be part of creator content [and a] shoppable experience, as we think about selling … times like back-to-school and holiday. This will be part of our ad proposition for partners,” Valentino said.
When asked during the interview with Modern Retail why Best Buy is investing more in these channels — why the company is so focused on creators and CTV advertising — one theme Valentino kept coming back to is the idea that, by bringing in these new elements, the dollars that advertisers are already spending with Best Buy could work harder.
As Lipsman pointed out, Best Buy has a unique advantage in that, as a leading electronics retailer, “many of the world’s largest advertisers have to be active with Best Buy Ads. They also have mega national media budgets, and Best Buy is building out strong offerings to capture even more of those valuable budgets.”
Best Buy has not publicly disclosed the size of its retail media business, but Valentino said it will see double-digit growth this year.
“The business will only continue to accelerate,” Valentino said. “Where there is scale, there is demand.”
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