Best Buy Ads’ Lisa Valentino on creating connections with midnight events

Earlier this month, thousands of gamers huddled outside Best Buys across the U.S. for the midnight release of the Nintendo Switch 2.

The moment brought back a nostalgic feeling of yesteryear, creating connections and community among loyal fans. Midnight product releases were a quintessential part of video game culture in the 2000s.

And now Best Buy is bringing them back, Best Buy Ads President Lisa Valentino tells The Current.

The new midnight launches flow back to the company’s marketing efforts, which ties 93% of all transactions in store, in the app or online to its identity graph.

The Current Editor-in-Chief Stephanie Paterik spoke with Valentino about Best Buy’s customer journeys, the rising number of people buying online and picking up in store and how she’s transitioning into the world of retail media after a decade-plus at Disney.

You are within your first year in your new role at Best Buy. What are you obsessing about right now?

Oh, my God, we don’t have enough time, Stephanie. I am obsessing about the whole idea of retail media. So much of my background was platform, streaming and television.

There’s so much goodness in that whole media ecosystem, but there’s a whole other layer that I think retail and commerce media bring to the table. And so, I am very much going to school on all things retail.

I was shocked to find out the percentage of customers who are buying online and then going to the store to pick up. How are you making the most of that customer journey?

It’s eye-opening, right? If you think about it — and I wonder if this is a post-COVID behavior — customers want instant satisfaction. We all do.

We’ve been trained by other platforms and environments. And so, we see with curbside and in store, on average 40% of customers will pick up. I don’t know if you have young kids in your house [or] if you have gamers in your house, but we had a Nintendo Switch 2 moment a week ago.

When we did the preorder for the Switch 2, 70% of all preorders were midnight pickups in store. So, it’s really interesting when you get inside of tech culture.

We haven’t done a midnight-pickup drop in years. We used to do it all the time. And so, you’re going to see that come back to consumers.

It was all over social media, the lines and the momentum and the culture around that.

I have a 9-year-old son who’s big into gaming, and I know several parents who took their kids to wait in line for Best Buy to pick up the Switch 2. And it took me back to the ’90s and aughts. Black Friday is going shopping at midnight with my mom.

When you use the data signals from the customer — [and] we have the good fortune of a very large first-party data graph with about 80% of the U.S. population — we see all of the transaction behavior off of that identity graph.

We can tie 93% of all transactions in store, in the app or online to our graph.

It starts to create really interesting opportunities. You talked about how you pay that off; 93% of all Starbucks and McDonald’s are within a one-mile radius of a Best Buy. You can start to think about how you might pay off or enrich those journeys.

All of these adjacent categories are looking to disrupt.

If you were trying to tap into the NFL audience, there’s certain doors you’ve gone through for years. I was one of them in my former life at Disney. You have to find those new doors.

Something that comes to mind is the importance of partnerships. As you’re looking for those synergistic brands, are you teaming up with Starbucks? Are you teaming up with the NFL?

The answer is yes. That’s a big reason why I’m here. This week we’re having really interesting conversations on the partner front. So, I think in the next four to six months, you will hear a lot from us on the partner front.

What did you learn from your Disney experience that you’ve taken with you into this new role?

Everything is informed by the consumer.

I was at Disney for 12 years and the last four to five [years] were super meaningful because we resignaled the company around the customer. The go-to market for the Disney portfolio — which they’re executing today — is all about a data-led, technology-informed, go-to market.

Retail media offers an even greater opportunity because of the type of data we sit on. [It offers] the proximity to the transaction that at Disney we never could get close to.

At Best Buy, 50% of our revenue comes from off-site activity. It’s a really interesting data point because most retail media networks are monetizing their on-site supply.

There was a recognition that if we could use our data to inform off-site supply, like CTV and social, we could drive incrementality.

I would say we’re in the second phase of this business. I think you’re seeing, even along this Croisette, a lot of retail companies. You’re seeing the financial services companies lean in and others.

What it should be telling us is the new currency for media is data.