CRI Gets Into Digital OOH Via New Deal With Shopping Center-Focused Starlite Media

April 13, 2023 by Dave Haynes

Creative Realities has announced a deal it says could involve as many as 5,000 new screens for a deployment led by a media company that’s mainly focused on large outdoor shopping centers anchored by big boxes and supermarkets.

Starlite Media already has some 6,000 ad faces in top markets around the US, but most of those are static posters on everything from shopping cart corrals and light poles to the exterior walls of grocers and other businesses.

The expansion is on the back of a deal Starlite announced last month with Quantela, an urban infrastructure solution provider, and Digital Alpha, an investor that will “provide the capital required to add more than 5,000 new digital media assets over the next three years through the strategic partnership.”

CRI, in PR, says it has been “designated as the design, procurement, and installation provider for strategic partnership with an initial deployment commitment valued at $2 million to the CRI and approximately $50 million of additional backlog at full deployment.”

“The promise of on-premise digital media is vast as advertisers seek impressions on the retail path to purchase, place of purchase, point of purchase and path to home,” says Rick Mills, CEO of Creative Realities. “This is just the beginning. Combined with the Company’s unparalleled capacity to deploy at scale for enterprise customers, our technology stack and ad-serving platform are well positioned to exploit the explosive growth of place-based Digital-Out-Of-Home networks.” 

When CRI acquired Reflect, the key component (I’m at least thinking) was the company’s AdLogic software platform, which was ad targeting capabilities for retail media networks. That would presumably be driving this network, though it is the sort of work you’d expect to go to a Broadsign or Vistar Media – as this at least appears to be much more a DOOH network than a retail media network.

The qualifier on this, as is the case with most announcements of this kind, is that it could see as many as 5,000 new screens, but also only grow to a percentage of that. Anyone on the sales side of this industry has hard-won experience with prospects that talked about screens by the thousands but ended up doing hundreds … or dozens.