Company At Center Of Messy Walgreens Digital Chiller Deal Now Calling Itself CoolerX, And Touting (Of Course) AI

January 24, 2025 by Dave Haynes

A couple of US business publications have had stories up in recent days looking at the mess that has become the attempt to turn the refrigerated cabinet doors in Walgreens stores into media and sales promotions screens.

That story has been pretty well-documented, but there are some new details available about how ugly it has evidently become, and how the company that came up  with the dubious idea is now among the many, many tech companies leading its marketing with AI references and working Nvidia partner into PR and marketing.

Cooler Screens is now calling itself CoolerX, and touting how it is “at the forefront with innovative retail media and merchandising solutions that boost performance and enhance the consumer experience.”

The company first came to attention after it did a deal with pharmacy chain Walgreens to swap out the conventional glass doors that sit at the front of chillers – cabinets containing stuff like milk and yogurt – with glass doors that included a transparent LCD layer. So instead of shoppers being able to see into the chillers, there were digital planograms and ads – the idea being these would boost sales and newfound trade advertising dollars.

This post from 2023 gets into the back story of how this all started and then went into a big-time tailspin, ultimately resulting in Cooler Screens suing its business partner Walgreens for $200 million, and then Walgreens counter-suing. A contract saw Cooler Screens installing 10,000 smart doors across 100s of  Walgreens locations, with plans to eventually install 35,000 more doors.

That dispute is still in the courts and the screens are still going, kinda sorta, I think. But maybe not. Different reports say different things, and there are no Walgreens up here in the frozen maritime Canada tundra. The most interesting thing coming out of stories in Fortune and Bloomberg is word that CoolerX tried to play hardball in December 2023 with Walgreens.

Bloomberg reported that doors at select Chicago locations “glazed over with white pixels,” or “blacked out altogether.”

Arsen Avakian, CEO of Cooler Screens, confirmed to Bloomberg that he had his team shut off Walgreens doors altogether in an attempt to get the company to respond to overdue invoices. “I got to tell them once, twice, three times, five times, ‘Guys, you got to pay the f—ing bill!’” Avakian told Bloomberg. “We’re somehow surviving this assassination attempt by Walgreens, which will be a miracle if we do.”

“We were disappointed in Cooler Screens’ attempts to interfere with our customers’ experience in certain stores and are pleased all their cooler doors have now been removed,” a Walgreens spokesperson told Fortune. “We look forward to showing all the ways in which Cooler Screens breached its contract and being vindicated in court.”

“This was a brazen pressure tactic intended to harm Walgreens’s business and customer reputation during the busy holiday shopping season and force Walgreens to capitulate to Cooler Screens’s demands,” a Walgreens lawyer wrote in a court filing, according to Bloomberg. 

The pivot to CoolerX doesn’t entirely leave behind the no-hoper chiller screen concept, but it is now anything but front and center – with videos and images focused on more conventional retail media network screens peppered around supermarket and mass merchandise environments, like “bar-type” extra-wide screens on aisle headers and mounted vertically on building support columns.

Screenshot

There’s also a LOT of referencing of AI, though that’s common across any tech vertical. To be fair, I am sure there are marketers trying work out ways to attach AI references to garden rakes and roofing shingles … and NOT mentioning AI would be the mistake when it comes to marketing retail media.

The commercial structure of the CoolerX retail media starter solution is not overly clear, but it appears the company now wants retailers to put in any screens on their dimes, paying a SaaS fee and agreeing to a revenue share.

The offer looks polished and current, but any substantial retailer looking at a deal with CoolerX would – unless asleep at the wheel – have eyebrows raised to the tops of foreheads by reading how things went with the Walgreens deployment.