PALM SPRINGS, CALIF. – Sean Crawford, managing director of SMG North America, has a simple message for brands chasing the next shiny thing: most shoppers are still, very literally, shopping.
“I think in store for retail media is a hugely untapped opportunity here,” Crawford said in this interview with Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting, pointing to categories like grocery where “80, 90% of physical shoppers, customers, consumers, are still buying in a physical store.”
That reality creates an obvious, slightly inconvenient conclusion for marketers who have been living in dashboards: if the bulk of sales still happen in the store, then retail media should show up there too.
Crawford framed it in practical terms: “If you want to reach an audience where majority sales is still happening, for me as a brand, I would want to activate my retail media campaign in that physical store.”
Translation: meet people where the cart is.
From printed signage to screens, audio and everything connected
Crawford described in-store retail media as an evolution from the old world of shopper trade and printed point-of-sale signage to loyalty-driven targeting, then to the digital ecosystem inside the store, including “your screens and your audio that’s going on in the store.”
But the point is not to swap cardboard for a screen and call it innovation.
The real opportunity, he said, is connectivity: “It’s about bringing your traditional channels, your analog and print channels, alongside your then digital channels, your screens and your audio, and then connecting that up to the onsite and offsite inventory.”
In other words, stop treating the store like a separate planet and start treating it like a measurable part of the same campaign universe.
Measurement is not solved, but good is available right now
If you are waiting for a perfect in-store measurement standard, Crawford has bad news and a pep talk.
“No one’s got the silver bullet yet,” he said. “No one is doing best practice at this stage, because it’s still an undeveloped category.”
Still, he argued the industry can move forward without collapsing into analysis paralysis.
“We shouldn’t let perfection be the enemy of good,” Crawford said, advocating for test versus control frameworks that show sales uplift in exposed stores compared with control stores.
That approach, he suggested, can be standardized across retailers so brands can compare networks on an apples-to-apples basis and see where they are getting the best lift.
The longer-term dream is more granular attribution, the kind that answers the blunt shopper question, as Crawford put it: “Did you buy it?”
That is the “North Star opportunity,” he said, but he also offered a reminder for teams tempted to overengineer the present.
“We don’t need to overcomplicate it though,” Crawford said. “We can absolutely start with good, and get to the North Star of perfection.”
Retail data meets connected TV, with a warning label
Crawford also connected in-store and commerce media to connected TV, describing how SMG works with retail partners to apply first-party loyalty data to reach new audiences across CTV, onsite and offsite.
“First-party data should flow through all of that, in my opinion,” he said, because offsite activation in CTV is not exactly bargain-bin media.
He put it plainly: “It’s not cheap,” which is why buyers need to plan holistically and tie CTV to advertiser KPIs. Otherwise, Crawford warned, it becomes “a way of spending a lot of money very quickly and not getting a great return.”
Stop calling it a screen, start thinking like a shopper
Asked what buyers should do now, Crawford’s advice was to stop treating in-store retail media as a single tactic.
“Don’t just see in-store retail media as a digital screen, or a digital piece of audio,” he said. “It is so much more.”
He urged agencies to connect planning “from your traditional, above the line media, all the way through to the point of purchase in a store,” and to design messaging around the full set of touch points a shopper encounters, from phone to physical placements to onsite and offsite media.
Then came the line that should be printed on every retail media brief, preferably in large type, preferably near the snacks.
“There’s no point doing retail media if it’s not gonna enhance the customer experience,” Crawford said, adding that it can improve that experience “when it’s planned correctly and executed correctly.”
In other words, in-store retail media is not a science project and it is not a screens-for-the-sake-of-screens contest. It is a chance to reach people at the moment they are most likely to buy, measure it well enough to prove uplift, and do it without making the shopper feel like they accidentally wandered into a trade show.
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