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In-Store vs Online Retail Media: Why Physical Screens Are the Next Growth Frontier

Retail media started as an online story — search ads, banners, sponsored product listings on a retailer's own website. That story is now crowded and increasingly expensive for brands to compete in. The next chapter is happening in a channel almost nobody has fully monetised yet: the physical store.

Online Retail Media Has a Ceiling

Every major retailer with an ecommerce presence now runs some form of on-site advertising, and the largest players — Amazon chief among them — have set the price brands expect to pay for placement. That has pushed online retail media auctions to be competitive and costly, particularly for categories where several brands are bidding for the same search terms or homepage slots.

In-Store Is the Under-Monetised Channel

Despite roughly 80% of consumer spending still happening in physical stores, only around 10% of retail media budgets currently target in-store channels. That imbalance exists mostly because most retailers haven't built the infrastructure to sell in-store screen space the way they sell website ad space — not because brands don't want the reach.

Why Physical Screens Convert Differently to Online Ads

  • A shopper sees an in-store screen seconds before they reach the shelf, at the point where the buying decision actually happens

  • There's no ad blocker, no scrolling past it, and no competing browser tab — the screen has the shopper's attention in a way a banner ad rarely does

  • In-store ads can be tied to physical proximity: a drinks brand's screen ad next to the fridge it's stocked in, for example

What This Means for Retailers Sitting on Idle Screens

If your business already has digital signage, you're sitting on the exact inventory that's currently in short supply relative to demand. Brands that already advertise online with a retailer are increasingly asking whether that retailer can also offer in-store placement — and most can't yet answer yes.

How CleverPosters Helps You Capture This Gap

CleverPosters gives retailers the scheduling, playlist management and reporting layer needed to treat in-store screens as sellable media — the same infrastructure online retail media already has, built for the physical estate instead. That means a retailer can start answering yes to brands who are already spending with them online.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is online retail media saturated?

For many categories, yes — the largest online retail media auctions are highly competitive, which pushes up the cost for brands to appear in front of shoppers.

Because it started from a much smaller base. Very few retailers have built the infrastructure to sell in-store screen space, so there's more available inventory relative to brand demand than there is online.

Yes, particularly CPG and grocery-adjacent brands, because in-store screens reach shoppers at the moment of the purchase decision rather than earlier in their browsing journey.

Yes — this is increasingly how larger retail media deals are structured, bundling on-site and in-store placement into a single media plan.

No. In-store retail media can be sold independently of any online advertising programme — it only requires screens and a way to schedule and report on paid content.

Once a CMS with scheduling and reporting is in place, a trial campaign with an existing supplier can often launch within a few weeks.

CleverPosters manages scheduling, playlist mixing, and reporting for every screen in a retailer's estate, giving retailers the same infrastructure online retail media platforms already have.

If your screens are already installed, you don't need to build a new online media business to compete — you need to point the physical estate you already have at the same brand budgets. That's where CleverPosters comes in.

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