Best Buy announces in-house ad network Best Buy Ads

Electronics retailer Best Buy has announced Best Buy Ads, a new in-house media company that will use its trove of first-party data to sell ads from other brands and serve them to customers through search, video, display, social media and store advertising.

This venture follows the trend by other national retailers like Lowe’s and Walgreens to leverage its customer data and sell the opportunity for other advertisers to target them.

Best Buy boasts three billion interactions with its customers per year, online, in-store and through in-home service calls. From this rich data, Best Buy Ads has developed over 15,000 unique attributes that generate customer insights, segmenting and targeting, according to the Ads site.

Why we care. It’s more important than ever for brands big and small to build direct relationships with their customers, and this means through first-party data. National retail chains with large customer bases have a big advantage not only in using the data to grow revenue, but to profit from solving the data problem for other brands.

For marketers who want to avoid paying through the nose to advertise in a walled garden like Amazon or Facebook, an opportunity to advertise through a big box chain raises the same questions. It also raises the bar for understanding the customer’s limits to being served too many ads.

About The Author

Chris Wood draws on over 15 years of reporting experience as a B2B editor and journalist. At DMN, he served as associate editor, offering original analysis on the evolving marketing tech landscape. He has interviewed leaders in tech and policy, from Canva CEO Melanie Perkins, to former Cisco CEO John Chambers, and Vivek Kundra, appointed by Barack Obama as the country’s first federal CIO. He is especially interested in how new technologies, including voice and blockchain, are disrupting the marketing world as we know it. In 2019, he moderated a panel on “innovation theater” at Fintech Inn, in Vilnius. In addition to his marketing-focused reporting in industry trades like Robotics Trends, Modern Brewery Age and AdNation News, Wood has also written for KIRKUS, and contributes fiction, criticism and poetry to several leading book blogs. He studied English at Fairfield University, and was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. He lives in New York.