Perion Network Ltd. will become the end-to-end technology partner for Best Buy Canada's in-store digital signage, the two companies announced on June 16, 2026, in a deal that converts the retailer's 308 stores from fixed-loop advertising screens into a programmatic, impression-level advertising channel. The agreement gives Perion its full advertising technology stack inside the stores: an ad server, a supply-side platform, and header bidding infrastructure, replacing the systems the retailer used previously.

For PPC Land, the deal sits inside a wider pattern of full-stack technology providers displacing legacy in-store signage systems at national retail chains, a trend the publication has tracked across grocery, electronics, and general merchandise retailers throughout 2025 and 2026.

What changed inside the stores

Best Buy Canada Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of Best Buy Co., Inc. and one of the country's largest omnichannel electronics retailers, operated its in-store digital signage on what the companies describe as a "loop-based" model. Loop-based signage plays a fixed, pre-scheduled sequence of content on a continuous cycle, without real-time bidding, without impression-level reporting, and without the ability for an advertiser to adjust delivery mid-campaign based on performance.

The new arrangement replaces that model with programmatic, impression-level decisioning. Each screen becomes an individually addressable, biddable unit rather than a slot in a fixed rotation. According to the joint announcement, this shift is intended to increase yield for Best Buy Canada and to give advertisers real-time performance metrics that were previously unavailable in the retailer's offline, in-store environment.

Thierry Hay-Sabourin, Senior Vice President of Ecommerce, Marketplace and Marketing at Best Buy Canada, said Perion provides the technology foundation to help modernize and scale the retailer's in-store media offering. "A programmatic-first, loopless model enables more effective, measurable experiences for brands and agencies, while unlocking the valuable advertising moments that our in-store environment offers," Hay-Sabourin said.

The retailer operates 308 Best Buy, Best Buy Mobile, and Best Buy Express stores across Canada, according to the companies. That store count, combined with the BestBuy.ca ecommerce property, positions the deployment among the largest SSP-enabled digital out-of-home networks in the Canadian market once the transition is complete, according to Perion.

The technology stack Perion is deploying

Perion's contribution to the partnership spans three distinct layers of its advertising technology stack, according to the announcement: an ad server, a supply-side platform (SSP), and header bidding technology. Together, these three components form what the industry generally refers to as a full-stack solution: rather than licensing a single point tool, the retailer is adopting Perion's entire chain of infrastructure, from the software that manages and schedules the creative through the auction layer that solicits competing bids for each impression.

Header bidding, in a digital out-of-home (DOOH) context, applies the same underlying mechanism long used in web and mobile advertising to physical screens. Instead of an ad server calling a single demand source sequentially, header bidding lets multiple demand sources compete simultaneously for each individual impression before the winning bid is served to the screen. The technique is one Perion has offered since its 2023 acquisition of Hivestack, a programmatic DOOH company, which PPC Land covered when the deal closed in December 2023. Hivestack's original offering included a DOOH ad server, an SSP, header bidding, and audience planning tools, and that acquired technology forms the backbone of what Perion is now deploying inside Best Buy Canada's stores.

Tal Jacobson, CEO of Perion, framed the deal as validation of the company's broader commercial strategy. "By serving as a foundational infrastructure for a market leader such as Best Buy Canada, we demonstrate that our Perion One strategy allows us to win complex, enterprise-level mandates," Jacobson said. "We are creating a repeatable playbook to modernize retail media networks globally, ensuring sustainable growth and deeper strategic relationships with high-value partners."

Perion One is the unified brand under which the company consolidated its previously separate technology units. PPC Land reported on the launch of that strategy on February 3, 2025, when Perion announced it would bring its CTV, DOOH, web, and other advertising units under a single Perion One platform, a restructuring that included executive appointments spanning revenue, product, and technology leadership.

Where this fits inside Perion's financial results

The Best Buy Canada partnership arrives roughly one month after Perion reported its first-quarter 2026 financial results, and the growth trajectory in those results provides useful context for why a retail media and DOOH mandate of this size matters to the company. Perion reported total revenue of $90.4 million for the quarter ended March 31, 2026 on May 20, 2026, a 1% year-over-year increase from $89.3 million.

Within that total, DOOH spend rose 29% year-over-year to $60.6 million, up from $47.2 million in the same quarter of 2025. Retail media spend increased 27% to $36.5 million, up from $28.7 million, though Perion's Chief Financial Officer Elad Tzubery noted some softness in the consumer packaged goods vertical during that quarter. Both figures outpaced the broader market: PPC Land noted that the DOOH category overall was forecast to expand 14.5% in 2026, making Perion's 29% growth in that segment a meaningful outperformance relative to the category average.

Perion's client roster spans 52 of the Fortune 100 companies, according to the company's investor presentation, including 17 of the 19 largest consumer and retail companies. A retailer the size of Best Buy Canada, while a subsidiary rather than a Fortune 100 entity in its own right, sits within the consumer electronics category the company has continued to target as it builds out its retail media and DOOH infrastructure business lines.

How this compares with other full-stack retail media deployments

Best Buy Canada is not the only major electronics retailer to move its in-store signage onto a full-stack technology provider in 2026. Broadsign, a competing out-of-home technology platform, announced on April 22, 2026 that JB Hi-Fi, described as Australia's largest consumer electronics retailer, was deploying the Broadsign Platform across more than 200 stores to centralize ad operations, integrating with Criteo and Retail Media Works as demand partners.

The parallel is instructive. Both deals involve a national consumer electronics chain, both replace a fragmented or manual approach to in-store screen management with a centralized technology platform, and both frame the shift explicitly around measurement: real-time availability, standardized campaign reporting, and the ability to plan, execute, and measure in-store advertising from a single hub rather than negotiating placements manually. Where the Best Buy Canada deal differs is in its emphasis on the specific auction mechanics: Perion's inclusion of header bidding technology, alongside its ad server and SSP, signals that Best Buy Canada's screens will operate with the same multi-demand-source competitive bidding structure used in programmatic web and CTV advertising, rather than a single, negotiated demand relationship.

Beyond electronics retail specifically, PPC Land has also tracked a wave of grocery-sector in-store retail media launches in 2026 that illustrate how widely retailers across categories are pursuing similar infrastructure. The Raley's Companies launched an in-store retail media network across 208 stores in California, Nevada, and Arizona through a partnership with Grocery TV, announced on May 20, 2026. Stater Bros. Markets took a phased approach, partnering with In-Store Marketplace on May 5, 2026 to launch programmatic audio across 165 Southern California stores, with digital screens planned for later in the year.

What distinguishes these deals from the Best Buy Canada arrangement is scope: the grocery deployments generally added retail media capability to stores that previously had little or no digital in-store advertising infrastructure. Best Buy Canada, by contrast, already operated digital signage; the change here is a shift from a loop-based, fixed-schedule model to a programmatic, auction-driven one.

The technical distinction between loop-based and programmatic signage

The distinction between loop-based and programmatic in-store signage carries specific operational consequences worth detailing. A loop-based system plays a predetermined sequence of advertising content on a fixed cycle, typically negotiated and scheduled well in advance of the campaign start date. Under that model, an advertiser buys a defined number of plays or a defined duration within the loop, with limited ability to adjust delivery based on real-time performance, and with reporting typically limited to confirmation that the content played as scheduled rather than granular, impression-level data.

A programmatic, impression-level system replaces that fixed cycle with a bidding process that occurs at or near the moment each individual impression is served. Multiple potential advertisers, connected through demand-side platforms, can compete for that specific screen-and-moment combination, with the winning bid determined algorithmically. This is the same underlying auction mechanism that has driven web, mobile, and CTV advertising for over a decade, applied instead to a physical, in-store screen network.

The practical consequence for Best Buy Canada, according to the companies, is yield optimization: because each impression is auctioned individually rather than sold in bulk as part of a pre-negotiated loop, the retailer has the potential to capture higher per-impression value when advertiser demand for a given moment, screen, or store location is strong, compared with a flat, undifferentiated loop-based rate.

For advertisers and agencies, the corresponding benefit is measurability. Loop-based in-store advertising has historically lacked the granular reporting infrastructure that digital and CTV advertisers expect: confirmation that content played, without verification of foot traffic, dwell time, or any other exposure signal tied to that specific play. A programmatic, SSP-enabled system is designed to close that measurement gap, giving advertisers reporting comparable to what they already receive from digital display or CTV campaigns.

Context: Perion's broader DOOH and retail media build-out

The Best Buy Canada partnership is not an isolated transaction for Perion. It extends a strategy the company has pursued since its December 2023 acquisition of Hivestack, and one that has become a more prominent share of the company's overall business as its legacy search advertising revenue has declined. Perion's Q2 2024 results, reported on July 31, 2024, showed a 39% year-over-year revenue decline tied to changes in Microsoft's Bing search distribution marketplace, even as the company's retail media segment grew 75% year-over-year to $17.6 million that quarter and its DOOH segment, then including Hivestack on a pro forma basis, grew 41%.

That divergence, between a shrinking search business and growing DOOH and retail media segments, has continued through subsequent quarters. Perion's Q2 2025 results, announced August 11, 2025, showed the company's advertising solutions segment returning to year-over-year growth for the first time since the third quarter of 2023, an 8.3% increase to $80.6 million, driven substantially by DOOH and retail media performance.

Against that backdrop, a partnership of Best Buy Canada's scale represents a concrete instance of the enterprise-level retail media mandates that Perion's Q1 2026 investor materials described as central to its 2026 guidance. The company's full-year 2026 guidance, reiterated on May 20, 2026 despite a soft first-quarter adjusted EBITDA figure of $0.5 million, calls for contribution ex-TAC between $215 million and $235 million and adjusted EBITDA between $50 million and $54 million.

What the deal does not address

The joint announcement does not specify a financial value for the partnership, nor does it disclose a timeline for the transition from the current loop-based system to full programmatic operation across all 308 stores. It does not name the specific demand-side platforms that will connect to Perion's SSP to bid on Best Buy Canada inventory, nor does it disclose whether the retailer's existing advertiser relationships will transition automatically or require renegotiation under the new bidding structure.

The announcement also does not address measurement methodology in detail: it references "real-time performance metrics previously unavailable in offline environments" without specifying what those metrics will include, how audience composition or foot traffic will be measured at the individual screen level, or whether the system will incorporate any of the sales-lift or closed-loop attribution approaches that other retail media networks, including Grocery TV's in-store network, have adopted through third-party measurement partnerships.

Timeline

  • December 13, 2023 - Perion acquires Hivestack for $100 million in cash, plus up to $25 million in performance-based payments, establishing the DOOH ad server, SSP, and header bidding technology later deployed in the Best Buy Canada partnership.
  • July 31, 2024 - Perion reports Q2 2024 results, including a 75% year-over-year increase in retail media revenue to $17.6 million and a 41% pro forma increase in DOOH revenue.
  • February 3, 2025 - Perion announces the Perion One platform, unifying its previously separate technology units under a single brand and strategy.
  • August 11, 2025 - Perion reports Q2 2025 results, with advertising solutions revenue returning to year-over-year growth for the first time since Q3 2023.
  • March 16, 2026 - Perion files its Form 20-F annual report for fiscal year 2025 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
  • April 22, 2026 - Broadsign announces that JB Hi-Fi, Australia's largest consumer electronics retailer, is deploying the Broadsign Platform across more than 200 stores.
  • May 5, 2026 - Stater Bros. Markets partners with In-Store Marketplace to launch programmatic audio across 165 Southern California grocery stores.
  • May 20, 2026 - Perion reports Q1 2026 financial results, showing DOOH spend up 29% to $60.6 million and retail media spend up 27% to $36.5 million; the Raley's Companies and Grocery TV launch an in-store retail media network across 208 stores.
  • June 16, 2026 - Perion and Best Buy Canada announce the retail DOOH partnership covering 308 Canadian stores.

Summary

Who: Perion Network Ltd. (NASDAQ and TASE: PERI), an advertising technology company headquartered in Tel Aviv and New York, and Best Buy Canada Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of Best Buy Co., Inc. and one of Canada's largest omnichannel consumer electronics retailers.

What: Best Buy Canada selected Perion as its end-to-end technology partner for the monetization of its programmatic in-store digital signage network. Perion is deploying its Ad Server, SSP, and header bidding technologies across the retailer's 308 stores, replacing the previous loop-based signage system with a programmatic, impression-level decisioning model.

When: The partnership was announced on June 16, 2026.

Where: The deployment covers Best Buy Canada's network of 308 Best Buy, Best Buy Mobile, and Best Buy Express stores across Canada.

Why: The shift from loop-based to programmatic signage is intended to increase yield for Best Buy Canada through impression-level auction dynamics, while giving advertisers real-time performance metrics not previously available in the retailer's in-store, offline environment. For Perion, the deal extends its Perion One strategy of winning complex, enterprise-level retail media mandates, building on the DOOH infrastructure it acquired through Hivestack in 2023.