Interview by Inside Retail, May 30, 2025
Online retail media revolutionised the advertising landscape by unlocking new revenue streams for retailers and reshaping how brands reach shoppers and consumers.
The retail industry was able to leverage its unfair advantage against other media categories by leveraging its first-party customer data and checkout data.
Retail Media is estimated to generate $170 billion in revenue this year, however, this success has been limited to online although 80% of shopping is still happening in stores.
Retailers have been attempting to replicate the success of online retail media using DOOH technology on digital signage, a technology that was never designed for what retail media truly demands.
“The most common mistake is assuming that putting screens on a wall equals building a retail media network. It doesn’t,” Iman Nahvi, CEO of Advertima.
“Online retail media didn’t succeed because banners appeared on a website – it succeeded because of real-time audience segmentation, activation and closed-loop measurement,” he added.
“That’s the playbook. Ignoring it in-store is a strategic mistake.”
This is where Advertima comes in, offering retailers real-time audience intelligence into the store at scale and with full privacy compliance.
Delivering true retail media
Many retailers have focused their attention on e-commerce or omnichannel logistics – allowing the opportunity to activate shopper attention at the shelf, in real-time, with measurable outcomes to pass them by.
“Retailers who roll out screens without sensor tech or audience intelligence are setting themselves up to capture, at best, their fair share of the media market – based on their retail footprint,” Nahvi stated.
“But if they want more than that – if they want to attract real media budgets – they need to differentiate. That means enabling audience targeting and measurement from day one,” he continued.
The good news? The technology to integrate powerful in-store retail media already exists, and commercial viability is already proven.
Advertima Audience AI is a retail media technology that seamlessly integrates into a retailer’s existing in-store solutions.
“Our visual-spatial sensors detect shoppers anonymously and, without recording or storing any images, translate physical shoppers into digital audience profiles,” Nahvi explained.
“Our AI then predicts age, gender, and group composition, and combines these with contextual attributes in real-time to categorise each audience profile into monetisable segments,” he added.
“These segments are used to select the most relevant creative, measure campaign performance, or activate programmatic campaigns – just like online.”
Advertima’s in-store retail media tech stack delivers real-time audience targeting in-store without personal data thanks to its “privacy-by-design”.
Advertima built its technology in accordance with the strictest privacy standards in the world, including those of Switzerland and Europe. Its system doesn’t use facial recognition, store or send any images to the cloud.
“Instead, it captures anonymised spatial and behavioural signals – like body posture, head orientation, and group dynamics – and processes them on-device (on the edge),” Nahvi clarified.
“Then, our AI models anonymously predict audience attributes probabilistically and instantly,” he added.
Harnessing retail’s unfair advantage
Advertima believes that over time multi-billion dollars will shift to retailers if they start monetising their in-store environment the same way they do online. And all it takes is filling the missing piece with the right in-store tech stack.
“We don’t just add intelligence to signage – we transform the store into a true retail media channel,” Nahvi said.
“This forms the foundation for a unified omnichannel retail media offering – exactly what today’s media buyers expect from modern retail environments.”
Advertima’s Audience AI has had enormous success in markets around the world, delivering audience precision at scale for retailers.
“In one UK deployment, we worked with a retailer to compare legacy loop-based DOOH layouts with real-time activation,” Nahvi shared.
“The DOOH setup delivered 12.3 million impressions, but only 16% reached the campaign’s target audience… With Advertima, 72% of impressions were in-target – a 4.5x improvement,” he added.
According to Nahvi, media buyers worldwide have demonstrated a willingness to pay two to three times higher CPMs for the kind of targeting and measurement that Advertima delivers.
However, the opportunity for dynamic in-store retail media is enormous.
“Retailers have the advantage of scale, shopper density, and digital maturity,” Nahvi concluded. “By combining this with real-time audience data and activation, they can build the most advanced retail media networks in the world – not just online, but in-store.”
“And they won’t just catch up – they’ll lead.”
Also read:
→ In-store Retail Media Trends 2025
→ How Audience Activation Works
→ The Difference Between Data & Audience Activation
Request a meeting with one of our In-store Retail Media experts
Learn how our In-store Retail Media technology can drive real-time data results for your brick-and-mortar store.
