Best Buy announces in-house ad network Best Buy Ads

Electronics retailer Best Buy has announced Best Buy Ads, a new in-house media company that will use its trove of first-party data to sell ads from other brands and serve them to customers through search, video, display, social media and store advertising.

This venture follows the trend by other national retailers like Lowe’s and Walgreens to leverage its customer data and sell the opportunity for other advertisers to target them.

Best Buy boasts three billion interactions with its customers per year, online, in-store and through in-home service calls. From this rich data, Best Buy Ads has developed over 15,000 unique attributes that generate customer insights, segmenting and targeting, according to the Ads site.

Why we care. It’s more important than ever for brands big and small to build direct relationships with their customers, and this means through first-party data. National retail chains with large customer bases have a big advantage not only in using the data to grow revenue, but to profit from solving the data problem for other brands.

For marketers who want to avoid paying through the nose to advertise in a walled garden like Amazon or Facebook, an opportunity to advertise through a big box chain raises the same questions. It also raises the bar for understanding the customer’s limits to being served too many ads.