Best Buy Ads’ President Lisa Valentino joins The Big Impression to discuss the evolution of retail media into what she calls ‘commerce media.’ The company’s latest AI That campaign with Microsoft is a good example of commerce media at play.
Best Buy has long been synonymous with consumer electronics, but today it’s making an equally aggressive play to become a major force in media and marketing.
In this episode of The Big Impression, Best Buy Ads President Lisa Valentino joins hosts Damian Fowler and Ilyse Liffreing to discuss how the retailer is turning stores, media and data into one connected commerce platform.
Damian Fowler (00:00):
I'm Damian Fowler.
Ilyse Liffreing (00:01):
And I'm Ilyse Liffreing.
Damian Fowler (00:02):
And welcome to The Big Impression.
Ilyse Liffreing (00:09):
This week, we're joined by Lisa Valentino, president of Best Buy Ads.
Damian Fowler (00:13):
She's leading AI That, a campaign with Microsoft designed to make AI-powered PCs feel practical, not abstract.
Ilyse Liffreing (00:20):
The campaign uses everyday scenarios to show how tools like Copilot actually work across media channels and in- store experiences.
Damian Fowler (00:28):
And that's the bigger idea. Retail media isn't just about driving clicks, it's about creating moments of understanding.
Ilyse Liffreing (00:34):
So today we're exploring how brands can connect storytelling, media, and physical experience into one system.
Damian Fowler (00:42):
So Lisa, we spoke in 2025 at Cannes. Since then, curious to hear from you what's new at Best Buy Ads.
Lisa Valentino (00:52):
First of all, it's so great to be here with both of you. What's not new? It's fun to be here at Possible and see and reflect really on the last year. Our strategy has taken, not only has our strategy really gelled in terms of how we're thinking about the opportunity to be an intersector of large media, connected commerce and retail and bring that to the forefront. We have hired a lot more people. We have spent quite a bit of investment building our tech stack, our partnerships, really thinking about where innovation is going to be an accelerant for Best Buy. I know we'll talk about some of that today, but it has gone very quickly the last year. And we have so much to be proud of. We were actually awarded Commerce Platform of the Year this week, which is super exciting and just a testament to the team that is standing shoulder to shoulder with me every day building this business.
Damian Fowler (01:59):
And one of the big themes that we're hearing, of course, of course it was that big theme last year at Cannes, but it's getting more nuanced around it is AI. And I wanted to just sort of talk a little bit about that through the perspective of the Best Buy campaign AI that.
Ilyse Liffreing (02:16):
Okay.
Damian Fowler (02:16):
Could we talk about that and the role there that Best Buy wants to play in terms of humanizing perhaps the role of AI?
Lisa Valentino (02:22):
We can. The campaign is a backdrop to why I joined Best Buy. If you think about the role that AI is going to play in just human everyday life and the world that we live in, there is no better company positioned to help tell that story. That's what Best Buy does. That's what we show up to do every day. And so we can dig into the campaign with Microsoft, which is an incredible one, but it also is the backdrop to the role that Best Buy plays in technology. Every day we enable technology for consumers. We took a very specific position with Microsoft in terms of helping them humanize, but that's what we do for all brands of all shapes and sizes every single day for millions and millions of customers that walk through our door. So the AI, that campaign was sort of born from that premise that as AI enabled PCs were entering the market a year prior, so over a year ago, the technology is so new.
(03:33):
We are steeped in it. We're steeped in MarTech, ad tech, but the average consumer is still on this journey of understanding. And so we saw that as an opportunity and frankly a responsibility to help tell that story. Microsoft also was at a really interesting inflection point because they were sunsetting Win 10. And so it really was this perfect storm of AI PCs entering the market. They also were transitioning their own product suite and AI that was born. And we really spent quite a bit of time with them thinking about customer. In a world where there is so much technology that is rushing at customers, the simple point is if you stay focused on the consumer and what they're going to need, that's really the guide for this program and so many others that we develop for partners.
Ilyse Liffreing (04:34):
Now, you're using retail media placements to drive awareness, but the store is also where people come in, experience and understand the product. How do you connect those two moments?
Lisa Valentino (04:48):
Right. AI, that was a story that we told over several months across several formats. We leveraged our in- store labor or blue shirts who are our ambassadors, if you will. They are the ultimate ambassadors for Best Buy. We leveraged all of the physical capability, our in- store physical footprint. We leveraged data and targeting to bring that campaign to life. We leveraged social, CTV. And so every capability that we have went into telling this story on behalf of Microsoft to consumers. The store plays an incredibly important role. I love this stat that 45% on average of all e-comm purchases get picked up in store.
Ilyse Liffreing (05:37):
Wow, that's high.
Lisa Valentino (05:39):
And by the way, it's even higher when you think about other categories like gaming. And it just, again, goes back to the consumer insight of when I want that product, whether it's a PC or it's a TV, I need it now. And so how do we leverage the fact that Best Buy has a thousand stores across the country and 80,000 employees, many of which sit inside of those physical stores to bring that campaign to life?
Damian Fowler (06:06):
I want to ask about the consumer journey now. I think because you mentioned, Lisa, you mentioned that you see everything through the perspective or you think about things from the perspective of the consumer. I'm interested to hear a bit more about that consumer journey and how they encounter the various media from the ends perhaps in a Best Buy store. What's that like?
Lisa Valentino (06:29):
So it's a really good point. And for this particular project that we did, creating these use cases around everyday real life, the benefits of how AI is going to make your day-to-day life easier, faster, more efficient, centered around family, centered around different use cases where we see our customer come to life. And there were social versions of that. There were video versions of that. There were versions of that that as we trained our labor in store, they were able to practically speak to that. That's when you have magic in a bottle, where the customer on the other end can see themselves through the lens of technology. And that is the beautiful thing that came to life here. And all of the different media formats play a different role. The role of CTV is really about awareness and inspiration, whereas the role of our in- store capability is really more about functionality.
(07:41):
How do I touch the product, see the product, see that benefit that AI-powered PCs can do through my own eyes? So again, I think the beauty of a Best Buy is, and so many people don't know this about us. So many customers are like, "I had no idea." And so just the same way that consumers, we love this at Best Buy. We know we're winning when customers say, "I had no idea could do that. " On the flip side, when advertisers and partners say to me and my team, "I had no idea Best Buy ads could do that. I had no idea retail media could do that. " We stretched so far beyond the lower funnel performant media, and that's why this campaign is one now of many because it's a really interesting playbook in terms of how you leverage all media, how you leverage the top of the funnel and pull that all the way through to the bottom.
(08:39):
And the results were here for this particular campaign, they were off the charts. So it was great to see.
Ilyse Liffreing (08:47):
I would like to dig into those results a little bit more. What do you feel like were the most important outcomes? What was perhaps expected? And then maybe what was something more surprising?
Lisa Valentino (09:01):
So with every campaign, there's clarity around the accountability, but to be able to see how we can deliver significant results in terms of awareness and consideration and also sell product, I never have sat in a seat professionally where we could check all of those boxes. And so just the sheer volume of the campaign, I think we delivered something like two billion impressions. We delivered a significant amount of clicks over seven million, which I think is a driver and a reflection of just how much engagement the customer had. I know we live in a world of clicks and impressions and CP everything, but when I look at that, those ads and that story was resonating. And so clients were clicking to find out more. The ROAs on this campaign was delivered well over expected rates. So that was really exciting to see. And it was a long campaign.
(10:06):
It lasted over several months. And so those were all really good signals. We also were optimizing this campaign along the way. And so how you also are using real-time data and insights to inform, okay, what's working? How do we do more of what's working and how do we optimize towards those was also a big part of it.
Damian Fowler (10:29):
On that point, could you give us a bit of a sense of the scale of the kind of buying signals that you see on this customer journey?
Lisa Valentino (10:36):
Sure. I mean, we see quite a bit of buying signals at scale every day. We have over 200 million customers in our first party data graph. It is the secret weapon of Best Buy. In addition to our brand and our influence, we also can ascribe 93% of transactions at that size makes with us down to a customer ID. And so why is that important? It's important because we know, I assume you're both Best Buy customers. We know when you're in market for new upgrade. We know if you're really interested in health and wellness tech, beauty tech, we might also be able to signal your family is growing based on some of the new technology that you're buying. So all of those signals are really the foundation of the data that we use to make our campaigns work harder for clients.
Ilyse Liffreing (11:38):
Now, obviously this campaign is less than a typical brand campaign that would be in market. It's more like a connected ecosystem, if you will. Is that how you think about retail media now? I know it's grown a lot even in the past year or two since you've been at Best Buy especially. How do you see it growing from this point into the future as well?
Lisa Valentino (12:06):
Sure. I mean, look, we do business. We're running a very large scale media business today, thousands of campaigns, hundreds of customers that we're servicing, and everybody has different needs. What's also really important is that technology mirrors the culture calendar. It's really interesting. I've spent a lot of my career in culture and doing a lot of storytelling around culture on behalf of brands. The biggest drive times for technology are around culture like live sports, back to school, holiday. We're coming up on Memorial Day big drive time for technology and appliances and things like that. So we have these ... So at different levels of scale, this happens to be a very large scale program. We're running several of these and they look different, right? They look different. We did some work with Nintendo last summer for the Switch too. Very big moment for young gamers. We opened up all of our stores at midnight for that drop.
(13:18):
We drove a ton of social. So every program is going to be endemic to the customer we're trying to reach on the other end and ultimately what the goals are.
Damian Fowler (13:31):
Yeah. My son's a crazy Nintendo Switch. Oh, there you go. The first one. I thought it was two and he said, no, dad, it's number one, but-
Lisa Valentino (13:39):
How old is he?
Damian Fowler (13:40):
He's seven.
Lisa Valentino (13:41):
Exactly.
Damian Fowler (13:42):
Yeah. I wanted to ask you more globally now. We talk about retail media and retail media are exploding, but this is bigger than retail media. And what we're talking about is beyond retail media. Could you sort of characterize that and how you think about it?
Lisa Valentino (13:58):
We were talking yesterday, we're really trying to shift the language to commerce media. Retail media I think is too small, but if you think about it, and I said this in Cannes when we did this session a year ago, it's media. It's not retail media, commerce media, it's the new media. And what an opportunity now to bring a media asset to the market that is performant, it's scalable, it's influential, it's inspirational, it transcends all borders. And so that is the opportunity that we have at Best Buy, but certainly there's a larger group of platforms that are engaged in that.
Damian Fowler (14:49):
Because the landscape is so large, I know that there's some unevenness there and about, especially when it comes to measurement, how do you think about that?
Lisa Valentino (14:58):
It's the next frontier. It absolutely is. I worked at Yahoo in the late '90s. I spent the first decade of my career there. And so it was a very exciting time, but it was the Wild, Wild West, if you guys remember the digital days or the early digital days. And there were likely, like there are today, 300 retail media networks, there were lots of digital companies back in the day. There were no standards. There was a lot of excitement. There was a lot of energy. There was a lot of talk about, is it too accountable as a medium? Would it ever become a huge part of the media ecosystem? We know all the answers to that. And I'm seeing a lot of the same trends in commerce media. And as an industry, and we've spent a lot of time at Possible this week talking about it, how can brands like Best Buy lead more standardization around measurement?
(15:54):
And once that happens, it will continue to drive share out of the market. And so no doubt the next 12 months for us is about multi-touch attribution work, like really advanced analytics and measurement because we can working with the set of partners that are going to scorecard this part of the business the right way. So we're all in various conversations on that front. Incrementality is a really hot topic right now and both incrementality and MTA are on our roadmap to deliver solutions this year. It's taking a lot of our focus, it's taking a lot of our investment. And it's because brands like Microsoft and others are saying, wait, if you can prove that you can deliver all of these types of KPIs, I need to see it. So it's about proof. It's about the evidence. We'll move it because every brand and every category is under pressure to perform and they're under pressure to drive attention with consumers.
(17:03):
That's the currency is attention. And so if a brand like Best Buy says, hold on a minute, we have attention of hundreds of millions of customers every year and we can help you tell your stories and we can help you sell your products at scale.
Ilyse Liffreing (17:18):
Yeah.
Lisa Valentino (17:19):
That's the opportunity.
Ilyse Liffreing (17:20):
How are you guys also adapting to the changing of technology from AI devices to connected homes? Obviously you guys sell that yourself, but how does that then change the role of advertising within the retail environment?
Lisa Valentino (17:36):
Sure. So the store, a great example of this is when you walk into a Best Buy, it's a screen, right? It's a large screen, whether it's our TV wall, whether it's our PC monitors. And so we have such an opportunity to bring what I would call digital out of home on steroids to life. And so to your point, how are we ... You'll see us this year do quite a bit of upgrade of the technology in our stores to do advanced targeting, to do high impact creative, to really leverage the fact that we have a thousand stores across the country. B entertainment studios are interested in that. The gaming companies are interested, our endemic partners. And so we are eating our own dog food to a certain extent, right? Because we're leveraging all of the tools and technology to advance capability
Ilyse Liffreing (18:33):
Like that. The screens make it that much easier.
Lisa Valentino (18:35):
It's why when you look at even some of the partnerships, we're an official partner of the NFL very intentionally. We know that our customer is the NFL fan. They are heavily focused on fantasy sports, college sports, professional. And so how we bring that to life, those signals, gaming is another one. We are testing, we're doing some really interesting work with tomorrow's golf league as an example. I don't know if you guys have checked it out. It's actually locally here in Florida. The facility is incredible. But again, that nod that sports and technology have always gone hand in hand. And so how does Best Buy? We're an enabler. That's what we are as a company. We are not making the products, we are enabling. And so we're going to keep doing that and we're going to hopefully continue to surprise and delight consumers back to that.
(19:36):
I had no idea it could do that. I had no idea Best Buy did that.
Ilyse Liffreing (19:41):
What would you say is still missing from the retail media ecosystem today?
Lisa Valentino (19:47):
There's a couple of things that I think we talked ... Standardized measurement I think is really important. It's not something that's missing, but there continues to need to be education in this space. Clients understanding not so much the should I, but more the how. Agencies, I've spent a lot of time this week with a lot of senior agency folks. It's in the corner of an agency still, commerce media. It needs to come to the center of the table.
Damian Fowler (20:18):
What's one assumption about retail media that you think is completely wrong?
Lisa Valentino (20:23):
That it's just a performance media. It is very performant, but it can do so much more.
Ilyse Liffreing (20:32):
If you could give CMOs one piece of advice about commerce media, what would it be?
Lisa Valentino (20:40):
Think broader about the role that it can play. And what I mean by that is you think about a brand like Best Buy and obviously we spend a good majority of our time with certain categories that are very endemic to what we do, but in a world where technology is unboxed every day, think about us, think about commerce media and your strategy more broadly.
Damian Fowler (21:10):
And finally, if you had an unlimited budget, what would you spend your money on?
Lisa Valentino (21:16):
People. In this world of AI, and I'm sure you guys have had this conversation this week, it's not a replacement, it's a compliment. And so we're going to need to continue to invest in people. We're going to continue to invest in the skills that our people have so that we are best positioned to, one, take advantage of the technology, and two, continue to ... We're in the media business because it's a human, creative, marketing business, and so people are going to be incredibly important in our future.
Damian Fowler (21:57):
And that's it for this edition of The Big Impression.
Ilyse Liffreing (21:59):
This show is produced by Molten Heart. Our theme is by Love and Caliber, and our associate producer is Sydney Cairns.
Damian Fowler (22:06):
And remember ...
Lisa Valentino (22:07):
The role of CTV is really about awareness and inspiration, whereas the role of our in- store capability is really more about functionality.
Damian Fowler (22:18):
I'm Damian.
Ilyse Liffreing (22:18):
And I'm Ilyse.
Damian Fowler (22:19):
And we'll see you next time.