Retail Screen Buying Against Store-Level Sell-Out

Buy retail screens by store cluster, never by network. In the chains I have worked in, something close to 15 percent of stores carry half of a brand's category volume, so a network-wide buy spends most of the budget in stores where the SKU has two facings and no share to defend. The engagement starts by cutting the store list, and it normally lands between 80 and 300 stores out of a network of several thousand. What has to be true before I take the work: At least 60 percent of the candidate stores must report weekly sell-out by SKU, through the retailer's supplier portal, a Nielsen Retail Index subscription the brand already pays for, or an EDI feed the commercial team receives and has forgotten about. Without that, in-store screens can only be read against a modelled audience, and I will say so on the first call rather than after the invoice. Building the buy: Store selection runs on your sell-out and distribution data joined to inventory at screen-ID level: position in store (entrance, aisle end, checkout, category adjacency), venue type under the OpenOOH taxonomy, loop length, and operating hours per store. Screens beside the category get bought; screens in the entrance atrium of the same store usually do not. Placement runs direct with the operator or the chain's own media arm, or programmatically through Vistar, Hivestack or Broadsign when the store list has to change weekly. Programmatic gets used when that flexibility is worth the margin, not by default. Reconciliation: Proof-of-play logs arrive weekly and are reconciled against contracted loop share per screen. Screens that go dark, run a shortened loop, or end up behind a promotional gondola get credited or replaced. This is unglamorous and it is where the recoverable money sits: on a first engagement I usually find between 4 and 9 percent of contracted plays that never ran. Reading the result: The design is a matched-store test, not a brand study. Test stores are paired with controls on twelve weeks of baseline category volume, store format, region and promotional calendar, and the read is a difference-in-differences on sell-out at week eight. The number that comes back is normally smaller than the one in the deck the network showed you. That is the reason to run it. Not included: No creative production beyond adapting an existing master to the loop lengths and aspect ratios the network actually runs. No trade negotiation, planogram work or promotional mechanics; that belongs to your commercial team and my version would be a duplicate. No sponsored products or on-site retail media on the retailer's e-commerce, which shares a budget line with this work and almost nothing else. No national takeovers. Who should not book this: Brands with numeric distribution below roughly 30 percent in the chain, where exposure outruns availability and the test reads as a media failure when it is a supply failure. Brands whose retailer will not release store-level data on any terms, including under NDA. Brands who need the answer to be yes. How I work: Fractionally, as the person who owns this channel inside your team. I hold two retail chains at a time and say so when a third is asked for. Portuguese and English, with documentation in both when a global team has to sign off on the spend.