Best Buy is no longer presenting retail media as a way for brands to buy access to shoppers. It is presenting it as a way for brands to buy the making of the content itself.
That distinction matters. Retailers have spent years building advertising businesses around first-party data, onsite search and purchase intent. Best Buy is adding another layer: the studio, the creator network and the production workflow that turn those assets into campaigns.
The company’s Best Buy Studios is a 70,000-square-foot production facility with sound stages, editing and audio suites, a fabrication shop, a food stylist prep room and a prop warehouse. Best Buy says the operation has more than doubled the number of videos it produces, while creating custom content for the retailer and partners working through Best Buy Ads.
The retailer becomes part of the production stack
The obvious reading is that Best Buy has built a large content facility. The more important shift is who now owns the relationship between the product, the audience and the creative execution.
Best Buy already has a valuable environment for advertisers: technology shoppers browsing products, comparing specifications and moving toward a purchase. Its advertising business adds search, display, video, social, influencer and in-store placements. The studio gives those placements a steady supply of material designed for the retailer’s own channels and for the broader media ecosystem.
That is a different proposition from simply selling an ad next to a product listing. Best Buy can help a brand decide how a product should be demonstrated, which creator or format should carry the message, where the resulting video should appear and how the campaign should be measured.
The operation also gives Best Buy a way to make technology more legible. A specification sheet can explain what a product does. A short video, a creator demonstration or a carefully staged scene can show why anyone might care.
Retail media is moving closer to entertainment
Best Buy’s influencer offering makes the same point from another direction. Its network separates awareness influencers, who introduce products to new audiences, from conversion influencers, who use calls to action and affiliate links to drive sales. The retailer is therefore treating creators as part of a funnel it can manage, rather than as a last-minute media placement.
That model reflects a broader pressure on retail media. As more retailers launch ad businesses, audience access becomes less distinctive. A brand can buy impressions from many commerce platforms. A retailer needs to offer something harder to copy.
For Best Buy, that something is the combination of tech-shopping context, customer data, physical stores, creators and production capacity. The company said in its 2025 Best Buy Ads showcase that its in-house creative team produced more than 3,000 campaigns the previous year. It also said 93% of transactional revenue could be connected to a customer ID, giving the creative operation a measurement story as well as a production story.
That combination will appeal to advertisers that want fewer handoffs between media, content and commerce. It also raises the standard for what retail media teams are expected to be. They are no longer only audience owners. Increasingly, they are becoming publishers, agencies and entertainment suppliers at the same time.
The strategic consequence is straightforward: retailers that want durable advertising businesses will need to make their environments creatively useful, not merely measurable. Best Buy is betting that the next advantage in retail media will come from helping brands make better content before helping them place it.