Advertima wants in-store retail media held to digital's measurement standards

Swiss computer vision vendor Advertima pivoted to retail media in 2021 with a single goal: bring the levers that made online retail media work to the store floor. "We want to make in-store digital signage an inventory that is as easy to measure and target as any other digital channel," said Iman Nahvi, co-founder and CEO of Advertima.

The pitch: use computer vision to measure the audience actually exposed to in-store digital screens, target that audience in real time and make the inventory easier for agencies to buy, mostly through programmatic. The company already works with several international retailers. It now wants to grow in France.

Advertima did not start in retail media. It launched in 2015 with Swiss grocery retailer Migros, on a cashierless store project along the lines of Amazon Go. Cameras and sensors identify in real time the products each shopper picks up, so they can walk out without stopping at a checkout.

Enthusiasm for cashierless stores ran into their cost. "By 2021 it was very clear that the technology worked, but that the capex needed to equip a store was too high to get a positive return on investment," said Nahvi.

Advertima then reused its technology – built to analyze shopper position, path and behavior – in a market with better economics: in-store retail media.

The first building block is audience measurement. Advertima installs its sensors in stores but supplies neither the screens nor the playback systems. It sells itself as a technology layer available through an API, plugged into the digital signage or retail media infrastructure a retailer already runs.

"With a single sensor, our technology can detect shoppers in 3D up to 35 or 40 meters away," said Nahvi. Two sensors would cover a 50-meter zone and track up to 200 people at once: their position, their posture and their path through the store.

The point is to separate shoppers who merely walk past a screen from those who actually look at the ad. Nahvi gives the example of five people standing in the visibility zone, only three of them turned toward the spot playing.

For each campaign, Advertima can report not only how many people walked near the screen, but how many were actually exposed. That metric sits closer to digital standards than the footfall counts retailers usually work with.

The analysis is not only used to measure campaigns after the fact. It can also run in real time to select the ad best suited to the audience in front of the screen.

A second before the next spot plays, the screen's CMS queries Advertima's API to learn the makeup of the group standing there. It then picks, among the eligible campaigns, the one that fits that audience best.

Nahvi is careful about individual identification. The technology uses no biometric data that would recognize a person, only temporary visual attributes such as the color of someone's clothes. The system can follow a shopper's path anonymously during the visit, then pass that session to the retailer's system.

The method is not foolproof. The company puts accuracy at 80%, which Nahvi said is more than enough to make the setup work.

Targeting options stay deliberately simple. "Estimated age and gender cover 60% to 70% of the requests we get," said Nahvi. Finer metrics, such as targeting on attention levels, are technically possible but hard to scale, he said.

Asked about a 7-Eleven campaign in Singapore where only impressions above a certain attention threshold were charged, Nahvi was cautious. "Building a product around attention alone can make activation more complex and cut reach too much, for a gain that is still unproven," he said.

Targeting is a nice-to-have anyway. Advertima's value sits in measuring the audience actually exposed, then tying that exposure to what shoppers buy.

Nahvi uses the example of a Coca-Cola ad playing on an in-store screen. "The retailer's transaction or loyalty data will tell it that a customer bought the product, but not that he actually watched the ad a few minutes earlier."

So Advertima creates an anonymous session for each person exposed and follows their path through the store. Passed to the retailer's system, that session then shows whether the exposure ended in a purchase.

Measure, target, attribute: that trio is what should turn in-store digital signage from a trade marketing lever into a media channel. Trade marketing is funded mostly by the brands already on the shelves. Media budgets open the inventory to a wider market, including non-endemic advertisers. For retailers, that is a potential growth driver, not a reshuffling of money already spent at the point of sale.

Agencies still need access to the inventory. Advertima makes its targeting and measurement available inside the tools they already use – DV360 at FairPrice in Singapore and at Majid Al Futtaim in the Middle East, Adform at Migros, Spar and OBI in Switzerland. From their DSP, buyers can select Advertima's segments, launch a campaign and measure exposure.

"Agencies will only change their media plans if in-store inventory can be bought in the same environments and the same ways as other digital channels," said Nahvi.

Standardization matters most for non-endemic advertisers – banks, insurers, telcos, carmakers – that get no natural benefit from sitting next to the shelf. To attract them, a retailer has to prove exactly who the campaign reached and what it was worth.

Italian consumer electronics chain MediaWorld found that out. It already had screens in its stores but struggled to sell them to non-endemic advertisers.

"After equipping 11 stores with Advertima's technology and opening that inventory to programmatic, it generated around €200,000 in agency revenue in two months," said Nahvi. The program is now being extended to 20 stores.

The business model combines revenue from deploying the technology and a variable fee indexed on the campaigns its data enriches. When its API is called to target or measure a playout, Advertima typically takes the equivalent of about 10% of the CPM the retailer charges.

The retailer, in turn, can charge a premium for inventory that comes with targeting and measurement. The chain can then sell two tiers: a standard campaign, with no targeting or advanced measurement, and a premium package that reaches specific segments and reports the audience actually exposed.

Advertima is paid for the extra value its sensors create on in-store inventory, not only for putting them in.

The company says it has several international deployments: Carrefour in the Middle East through franchise operator Majid Al Futtaim, Walmart in Mexico, FairPrice in Singapore, plus Migros, Spar and OBI in some European markets.

France has not been a priority market so far. Advertima is starting to talk to local players, and points to Unlimitail, which has just issued an RFP to sell its in-store retail media.

Advertima's success will depend less on how sophisticated its technology is than on how well it fits an ecosystem that is still fragmented. Between CMS, ad sales arms, DSPs, measurement tools, point-of-sale systems and signage infrastructure, promising an inventory comparable to digital means connecting a lot of pieces. To become a real media channel, the store first has to get all its technology talking.