If you’re an adult in Canada, chances are you’re a member of the loyalty program of the country’s leading retailer, Loblaw. Across its range of stores, the retail behemoth boasts 17 million customers, with 4.1 million shoppers visiting one of Loblaw’s 2,400 stores every day. 

Now Loblaw is betting big on the confluence of its treasure trove of loyalty data and rich in-store media offerings. This week at Advertising Week in New York, the company announced a major expansion of its partnership with STRATACACHE, the global leader in digital signage solutions. Together, they will build on its existing network of nearly 2,000 screens across 700 stores, rolling out new in-store digital ad infrastructure across hundreds more stores this autumn and throughout 2026.

“We’re scaling up our in-store screen network because that’s where customers are making their final purchase decision,” Lauren Steinberg, EVP and Chief Digital Officer at Loblaw, explained at Advertising Week. “That’s where you can actually inspire them.” Lauren revealed that 90% of Loblaw’s sales occur in physical stores—with 70% of all purchases made by members of PC Optimum, its loyalty program.

Growing its in-store retail media network will allow Loblaw to offer marketers unprecedented precision ad targeting while giving customers an enhanced shopping experience. As Chris Riegel, STRATACACHE’s founder and CEO, noted of the new expansion of their 15-year partnership, “Together, we’re building one of North America’s largest in-store digital screen networks to deliver a premium experience for both brands and shoppers.”

 

In-Store as the Heart of Omnichannel Strategy

As it ambitiously scales up its in-store infrastructure, Loblaw is betting that the depth and breadth of its sophisticated loyalty data paired with in-store insights will drive sales across all retail media channels. 

“Retail media is only effective in my opinion, if you’ve got really incredible, robust data, and you can tie customers back to transactions,” Lauren noted. At Advertising Week, she framed the STRATACACHE partnership within an intentionally-integrated business model where e-commerce, retail media, and loyalty function as interdependent growth levers.

According to Loblaw, its in-store digital screens as part of an omnichannel campaign, have driven a 3.6x increase in customer growth. It has also reported that pairing in-store screens with offsite campaigns delivers approximately a 12% lift in campaign performance.

But for brands and marketers, the biggest payoff may be predictive targeting that eliminates advertising waste. “How often do you see an ad for something that you just bought?” Lauren asked the Advertising Week audience. “If a family buys a 40-load dishwasher detergent, advertisers shouldn’t be spending money to target those customers with the laundry detergent after they’ve just bought it.”

Thanks to its loyalty data, Loblaw can parse purchasing patterns down to the day of the week and leverage its in-store screens to enable precision targeting for brands. It can predict that customers do their shopping for children’s lunches on Saturdays and target ads to them accordingly. It can even predict when a customer’s mascara is running low, based on purchase frequency.

 

The Shopper-First Imperative

Loblaw’s ambitious scaling initiative is not just about driving revenue; it’s about enhancing shopper experience. Retail media should be “an instrument to improve the in-store experience,” Lauren said. “If you do what’s right for the customer, they’ll respond by buying the products that you’re trying to sell.”

That means using in-store creatively to enhance the shopping journey. “I’ve seen some incredible in-store ads next to Skincare that show a woman’s face transforming with the product, and you can see the impact on the shopper,” Lauren noted. “That’s something I love –when advertisers don’t do the same thing they can do on print. They actually take advantage of the medium.”

More screens mean more opportunities to use the store as a creative canvas. As it scales up, Loblaw is pairing its customer-centric philosophy with STRATACACHE’s robust technical infrastructure—including real-time, privacy-safe measurement of in-store shopping behavior and patterns—to ensure they are creating coherent customer journeys.

“The beauty of working with a partner like STRATACACHE in in-store signage is they’ve got the right APIs to connect to all the different networks to the right connectivity into our data ecosystem,” she explained. “It’s making sure that all the channels can talk to each other at the end of the day. What you saw in-store should match what you see online. It may not be the same thing, but it should be taking you on a journey.”