# CES + NRF 2026: How In-Store Retail Media Is Changing

## Transcript

You're listening to the Middleman podcast with Tom Lemonello. So, usually at this time of the year, we'll just jump right in, line up a whole bunch of guests, and keep moving. And to be clear, we've already done that a bit. We have a couple of episodes that are recorded, and those are coming out soon.

But last year, we had 35 episodes, and a lot of them were focused on instore retail media. And after spending time at CES and NRF, it felt like the right moment to slow down and explain for a second how my thinking has changed after seeing those two events back to back. That's why I wanted to do a solo episode here.

Now, before we get into the episode, um I went to both CES and NRF. I don't know if I recommend that, but I definitely recommend the Stratacash. what's in store event and a big thank you to Jonathan Rosen for reaching out and letting me uh do a panel on intore creative. Um we had Tyler Luzerbrink from Ace Hardware, Red Vest Media, we had um Mario Majaras from 7-Elevens, Gulp Media, and we had Amy Andrews from Marginetti Commerce and we had a great conversation.

All of that will be available on the Stratacash website of the event. So you can go and have a look at that. I also had enough time to make a meme of Mark Williamson after his amazing Teen Wolf 2 presentation and I even had time to high-five Kerry Masters in person. Just generally a great time.

So again, thank you for inviting me. Um I'm a big fan of getting a chance to get on stage at any of these events, so I hope to do more. So this episode we're calling the Banded Pack. And if you're not from the retail world, a bandit pack is when two complimentary products are bundled together on the shelf.

This is not like a familysiz uh way to get higher volume of the same products. This is thinking about the use case soup and crackers or chips and salsa. I once saw ramen and gum, which was my favorite use case where you had soup and then your breath stinks, so you need some gum afterwards.

Um, each one works on its own, but together they just sort of click. And that's what CES and NRF were to me this year. CES was kind of like the ceiling. Um, it showed me what intore retail media looks like when you have real scale. You saw announcements from Albertson's bringing incrementality to instore measurement.

You heard Walmart talk about incrementality and sponsored search. So just overall retail media um getting more mature. It's very much the investor-f facing story, the CNBC version of retail media. It's proof that the category is growing up, scaling, and starting to adopt more rigorous measurement.

And I think that's great. Um, it also raises questions though, how does this work for shoppers, how uh the technology should be deployed, and how the different answers are for large retailers versus everyone else. Um, NRF is a lot messier. Uh, if you're not deep into retail, it can feel like a collection of point solutions.

It's a lot of hardware, a lot of people talking about software, and it doesn't feel like it's connecting to anything. A lot of demos. Um, and for me, this was my first NRF, so it was exciting. Um, but as I walked the floor, especially after coming from CES, I started to see something very different.

I saw approaches that weren't trying to replicate what Walmart and Albertsons are doing and instead were finding paths that could work for a much broader set of smaller retailers. Um, and that's where I think the banded pack idea really started to make sense. CES is going to show you the ceiling of what's what's possible at the maturest level and NRF shows you all these different paths.

Now, this is where it's important to see where we were. There were two episodes that we had. one almost two years ago with Trevor Sumner at Radiant where he talked a lot about brand funded very bespoke experiences where you built the cabinetry, you had front-facing cameras, all of these capabilities were sort of forced onto the vendor and the brand to fund and bring to the store.

Um, and then you we also had uh in last April a discussion with Marlo Nickel talking about how they pivoted away from a lot of this extra technology that the media buyers weren't really in favor of in the first place. Um, now to talk about sort of the bespoke capabilities that a brand funds, Trevor talked about perfume brands having really exquisite cabinetry and, you know, a black box that explained, you know, when you lifted up a product, what you should be uh, thinking about.

The same thing happens at Dick Sporting Goods now where you lift up a sneaker and the screen behind it will show you more information about it. Even Albertson's has now brought that with wine. we have an RFID at the bottom of one of the bottles and you lift the bottle and the screen behind it explains more about the varietal or the the brand itself.

All of those things are great when you are looking for high precision, high intent, bespoke activations to teach somebody about like a new product. Um, but it doesn't really fit in a retail media world where you're running drive periods and you want to swap out one brand for the other.

Um really if we're looking at a world where the retailer funds some of the infrastructure and the brand comes in and rents that space um for media that is really sort of where I think the future will be. I think it's good to listen to how in our episode with Grocery TV Marlo Nickel talks about how they built out all this technology and then they actually pulled back not because the technology didn't work but because the market the media buying market wasn't ready for it.

We used to do actually impression and engagement measurements. So we could actually see when someone was in front of the screen and whether they were looking at the creative or not, how long they were looking at it. So we could say like here's exactly how many impressions have been served and how engaging your creative is relative to other creatives.

And that was really cool stuff. But the reality is the market wasn't ready for that from a demand standpoint. And there's also just a lot of challenges from a scalability standpoint and a legal standpoint. And so we've really gone the other direction and got a lot more pragmatic and basically just said look just fundamentally this is a really good media product.

Let's just put great screens in the right parts of the store and and that alone is really valuable. And so that's what we've leaned into and focused on. So this was a quick episode really I just wanted to focus on the fact that we're moving away from bespoke overinstrumented experiences led by brands in store towards things that can actually scale across different types of retailers.

One of the themes that's come up for me including in the conversations uh like in the panel I did at Stratacastach is that you really have to start with the job to be done. uh when you're thinking about the creative and what you're trying to put in front of the consumer in a lot of cases you don't need a ton of technology to make that work.

However, there's also another layer around measurement sensing even things like screen quality that I saw at NRF that hasn't been talked about much in retail media yet, especially not in the CES track largely because it's not ready. But when that is ready, that is going to get us to that next level of instore retail media.

Some of that will show up in the upcoming podcast conversations. Some of it will be better handled in more visual written breakdowns alongside of the show. Um, but overall, that's where the tension comes in. The ambition for instore retail media has always been to make it more engaging, more measurable, but it only works if it fits the shopper experience.

Even when instore retail media is done really well, it is potentially something that makes the retailer nervous because anything that adds friction can slow down shoppers and actually reduce throughput. So all of us thinking about how dwell time is great and ad engagement uh we want to elongate that time.

Um a retailer actually thinks of that as a negative in some cases especially in the store. So the future of instore retail media is going to be defined by how well we balance that consumer experience with how well we can engage the consumer with new ideas and retail media in the store.