As retailers continue searching for new revenue streams beyond traditional product sales, retail media has emerged as one of the fastest-growing segments in digital advertising. While online retail media has attracted significant investment over the past several years, attention is increasingly shifting toward physical stores, where digital displays are creating new opportunities to connect brands with shoppers at the point of purchase.
Perion has announced a strategic partnership with Best Buy Canada, positioning the advertising technology company as the retailer’s full-stack technology partner for its in-store digital-out-of-home (DOOH) media network. The agreement expands Perion’s presence in the retail media sector while reflecting a broader industry push toward programmatic advertising inside brick-and-mortar locations.
Bringing Programmatic Advertising Into Physical Retail
Under the partnership, Best Buy Canada will deploy Perion’s full suite of advertising technologies, including its Ad Server, Supply-Side Platform (SSP), and Header Bidding capabilities, to manage and monetize its network of in-store digital screens.
The deployment marks a transition from traditional scheduled advertising loops to an impression-based, programmatic model that enables advertising inventory to be bought and optimized in real time. Rather than displaying pre-determined content rotations, the system makes dynamic decisions for each available impression, allowing advertisers to access performance metrics that have historically been difficult to measure in offline environments.
For retailers, the approach aims to improve the efficiency of their media assets while making in-store advertising more attractive to agencies seeking the same level of transparency and optimization available across digital channels.
Retail Media Continues to Expand
Retail media has rapidly evolved from an e-commerce advertising channel into a broader omnichannel strategy. As retailers digitize their physical locations, in-store displays are becoming valuable media inventory that can reach shoppers during high-intent purchasing moments.
Best Buy Canada, one of the country’s largest consumer electronics retailers, operates more than 300 locations nationwide. Converting that footprint into a programmatic advertising network creates a sizable source of premium DOOH inventory within the Canadian market while giving advertisers additional ways to reach consumers closer to the point of sale.
For Perion, the agreement also represents an opportunity to deepen its role beyond individual advertising products by serving as the underlying technology infrastructure across multiple layers of the retail media ecosystem.
The company says the deployment aligns with its broader strategy of increasing customer adoption of its integrated platform rather than relying on standalone solutions.
Infrastructure Becomes the Competitive Advantage
The partnership illustrates a growing trend in advertising technology: enterprises are increasingly seeking integrated platforms that manage multiple aspects of the advertising workflow rather than stitching together separate vendors.
By providing ad serving, supply-side monetization, and header bidding within a unified platform, Perion is positioning itself as infrastructure rather than simply another advertising vendor. That approach can simplify operations for retailers while potentially creating longer-term technology relationships.
“Perion provides the technology foundation to help modernize and scale our in-store media offering,” said Thierry Hay-Sabourin, Senior Vice President – Ecommerce, Marketplace & Marketing, Best Buy Canada. “A programmatic-first, loopless model enables more effective, measurable experiences for brands and agencies, while unlocking the valuable advertising moments that our in-store environment offers.”
The shift toward infrastructure-level partnerships reflects a broader evolution in retail media, where scalability, measurement, and operational efficiency are becoming increasingly important as networks mature.
A Playbook for Future Retail Media Networks
For Perion, the Best Buy Canada deployment serves as another example of its strategy to expand through enterprise-level partnerships in high-growth advertising segments.
The company believes the model developed through the partnership can be replicated with additional retailers seeking to modernize their in-store advertising capabilities while creating new recurring revenue opportunities from existing physical assets.
“By serving as a foundational infrastructure for a market leader such as Best Buy Canada, we demonstrate that our Perion One strategy allows us to win complex, enterprise-level mandates,” said Tal Jacobson, CEO of Perion. “We are creating a repeatable playbook to modernize retail media networks globally, ensuring sustainable growth and deeper strategic relationships with high-value partners.”
As retail media continues extending beyond e-commerce into physical stores, technology providers capable of delivering integrated, measurable, and programmatic solutions are expected to play an increasingly important role. Partnerships like this highlight how retailers are rethinking the value of their in-store environments, not only as shopping destinations, but also as scalable advertising platforms capable of supporting the next phase of retail media growth.
