‘How Brands Grow’ Incremental Sales with In-Store Ads

The Power of Performance in a Reach and Quality Medium

I recently co-authored an article published in WARC with Grocery TV Co-Founder & CEO Marlow Nickell entitled “‘How Brands Grow’ With In-Store Advertising.”

In the article, we apply Prof. Byron Sharp’s models for building brands—using reach and mental and physical availability—to prove that physical stores meet or exceed all the basic criteria for brand growth.

Our premise is simple: in-store media is effective because it delivers so much of the value that linear TV has traditionally delivered. It just so happens to produce these effects close to the point of sale.

In-Store Retail Media is Full-Funnel—But Performance Clearly Matters

In my previous article How In-Store Advertising Works, I argued that in-store retail media delivers reach, quality, and performance—in that order. The reason for preferencing reach and quality is that it’s otherwise easy to overlook the upper-funnel impacts that in-store advertising will have.

Encouragingly, CPG brands aren’t only looking at in-store retail media for driving in-store sales. According to BCG’s 2024 CPG Retail Media Benchmarking Survey, 53% of CPG brands and agencies want to primarily drive mid-, upper-, or full-funnel objectives. Nevertheless, the most common objective—and the remaining 47%—was lower-funnel.

It shouldn’t be altogether surprising that performance is the most persuasive objective, since marketing dollars will almost always gravitate to tactics that move the needle on sales.

And evidence is now stacking up that in-store retail media does extremely well in this regard. Grocery TV recently compiled a first-of-its-kind meta-study that aggregates 16 past lift studies from in-store retail media campaigns.