2025 innovations that are launching an even more impactful 2026.
2025 was a year of growth and change for Best Buy Ads. We embarked on a full transformation of our retail media network led by our strategy to scale, influence and innovate. Today, we are offering the world’s best brands a powerful way to connect with their consumers, and we want you along for the ride. As Corie Barry said at this year’s Best Buy Ads showcase, We Got Next, “we need you.”
As we look back on 2025, there were countless innovations and advancements we made as a Best Buy Ads brand that not only drove our growth, but also major growth for our partners. We’re excited to showcase just a few of the things that transformed our brand in 2025 and will certainly deliver even greater success for your brand in the coming year.
More robust audiences
In 2025, we set out to increase our scale and diversity of audiences so our partners could find the right customers for their campaigns. To meet the growing needs of our retail media network and marketing teams, we increased our audience graph by 30%, building 116 brand new custom audiences. These included first ever builds for non-endemic audiences like financial services, insurance and automotive. We also had our first ever custom audiences’ built-in collaboration with our partners via clean rooms, and first ever programmatic audiences available to purchase programmatically through The Trade Desk.
In addition to these new audiences, we also expanded our audience insights abilities with on demand audience insight dashboards, highlighting the spending power, hobbies, interests, demographics and more for every one of our 400+ audiences we have available today.
Game changing partnerships
When it comes to technology and the people and brands that matter most to consumer electronics shoppers, Best Buy is putting themselves at the forefront. From sports to gaming to influencers, we are at the center of tech culture, and can help put your brand there as well. That’s why we’ve made material progress in growing our customer relationships this year while also strengthening our brand momentum. Our partnerships with the NFL, TGL and NBCU have helped reinforce Best Buy as a brand that brings technology and experiences to life.
We also teamed with select influencers and content creators, giving millions of shoppers the trusted advice, inspiration and tips they were looking for regarding what products to use and where to get them. Since the April launch, we’ve partnered with over 1,200 total creators with over 275 published storefronts. By partnering with these trusted brand and product advocates, we connect our customers with their favorite creators driving them to shop at Best Buy. From Back to School to holiday shopping, this is a unique solution to provide customers with the right know-how, inspiration and products.
An ever-growing retail strong hold
The launch of Best Buy Marketplace delivered the largest expansion of our product assortment ever, including a huge range of new products like licensed sports merchandise from Fanatics, more holiday decorations, musical instruments, outdoor gear, even DVDs and Blu-rays. With 1.1K active sellers and 805K active offers, more products equal more shoppers which equals more sales.
Best Buy Marketplace also drove many new customers to our website, and re-engaged even more to the Best Buy brand, with 10.8% net new customers and 21.7% re-engaged customers. The best part, these customers are not only shopping and seeing Marketplace products, they’re also seeing your products as they scroll, shop, research and buy.
Add to that our continued growth in My Best Buy Memberships and you have even more tech focused customers who are heavily engaged with the Best Buy brand. Paid membership surpassed 8 million members, growing by +380K members year-over-year, with renewal rates improving by +204bps year-over-year. And we brought new value to members through exclusive offers such as NFL Sunday Ticket and our collaboration with McDonald’s Monopoly, along with a refreshed and more personalized email journey. All of this contributed to a year-over-year increase in Best Buy intent to shop and purchase intent metrics.
Our successes
From product launches to campaigns, here are just a few of the big successes Best Buy Ads experienced this past year.
With the release of the Nintendo Switch 2, we brought back midnight launches, creating lines of fans outside our stores like it was Black Friday in the 90s. We also had gaming trucks on hand post launch, and cultivated over 700 local TV news stories, hyping up Mario and his friends in a big way.
We also AI’d that! From June through July during the Back-to-School drive time, the “AI that” campaign showed up in-store, across social and on Connected TV platforms. This was the largest Best Buy Ads campaign to date, unlocking exciting new experiences for our customers, driving 1.9 billion impressions, 6.9 million clicks and a ROAS of $9.87.
The NFL and Brand Differentiator campaigns spotlighted our expansive assortment led by TVs, delivering 1.7 billion impressions, driving high impact visibility across TV, CTV, influencers and a strong in-store presence.
This past holiday was huge for Best Buy Ads as well, with onsite, offsite, social and more. We put brands in front of gift-hungry shoppers who were ready to buy. Here are just a few of the highlights:
2,000+ Offsite Campaigns
850+ Gift Ideas
200+ Marketplace Items Woven Throughout
17 Custom Social Videos
20 Custom TV/DV Spots
200+ Influencers Partners
New people and places
With all these amazing innovations and products, it was also important to grow our teams, not only in Minnesota, but from coast-to-coast. We opened a new office in the heart of New York City. We also hired Agency Executives to work with holding companies and agencies in New York, Minneapolis and Los Angeles.
These incredibly talented people are thinking bigger, pushing boundaries and showing up every day ready to create the future of retail and the future of retail media. Together, we’re serving our customers, vendors, clients and partners in new and exciting ways, shaping an identity rooted in tech culture, innovation and performance.
All these innovations in 2025 are leading us to deliver even more in 2026. We’re leaning into enormous change and growth, and we’re doing so by keeping our Best Buy values, vision and purpose at the heart of it. Ready to take the next step? Join us by reaching out to one of our Agency Executives and see how we can bring your brand to life in new and exciting ways in the coming year.
Share this article:
