Retail Study Offers Empirical Evidence That Screens In Stores Really Do Drive Significant Sales Bumps

January 19, 2026 by Dave Haynes

Adoption in digital signage for retail has long been throttled by skepticism about the true bottom line business aspects of the technology, but a 2025 study across a bunch of stores and marketing campaigns lays down how the whole thing really does work.

In short, researchers analyzed data from 237 advertising campaigns across roughly 30 million shopper visits, in actual retail stores, to conclude that shoppers exposed to messaging were 8.1% more likely to purchase the advertised SKU.​

Things vary, of course, but getting a 2%-5% bump from retail marketing is generally considered pretty good.

The research is all detailed in a paper called In-Store Advertising with Digital Signage, and some of its highlights were discussed by one of the lead researchers last week at the retail media conference STRATACACHE ran just ahead of NRF in New York.

The study was done in collaboration “with a digital signage provider that operates digital screens and creates value for both retailers and manufacturing brands.”

It doesn’t say who, but I have my doubts STRATACACHE would feature this work if it didn’t involve its retail-focused platform Scala, or the mothership’s.

The researchers used tracking technology to link specific ad plays on screens to shopper movements around stores to purchases, SKU by SKU.

That generated cause and effect estimates, and pretty much sidestepped common limitations of surveys, lab tests, or aggregated data.​

Historically, selling the dream of digital signage in retail having a clear ROI has been hampered by numerous things.

It’s only in the last few years that APIs have made tapping into retail sales data has been relatively easy and secure. But retailers have also been reluctant to broadcast to their competitors how their tactics are working. Other research has been on the dubious side because the sample sizes were small (like results from a pilot in a handful of stores) or the methodology was questionable.

The research found that beyond the products being featured on screens, retail digital signage exposure also lifted sales of other items from the same brand. It  generated category-wide bumps in sales, which suggests incremental impacts rather than shoppers just substituting between competitor options – let’s say laundry detergent or batteries.

The study suggests that unlike pure price promotions on screens, which can often boost spending buyer to buyer, digital signage primarily increases what’s called purchase incidence, which is a metric about yes or no buying decisions.

The data didn’t reveal any impact on something called purchase acceleration, where shoppers merely moved up buys on things they were going to purchase anyway.  But, the lifts showed  genuinely new consumption, with roughly 88% of added revenue that could be directly attributed to digital signage rather than overlapping promotions.​

The study has a bunch of other interesting insights. For example, treats, specialty items and lower-priced goods saw outsized gains, which tracks to the strength of screens in driving low-stakes impulse decisions. It also suggests optimal conditions for driving results are things like timing (weekends, later shopping hours), favorable weather, and high-traffic store moments when buyers show more relaxed, emotionally-driven behaviors.​

Creative really does matter: emotional messaging outperformed informational content, while sales promotion-driven messaging actually reduces the impacts.

I think the sellers know this more than end-users, but the study backs up how physical placement of screens is critical, with screens near product shelves driving stronger results than ones that are just positioned where they’d fit.

Here’s what the researchers laid out as the implications for the different stakeholders:

Implications for brand manufacturers

For brand manufacturers, digital signage has positive effects on the featured products and their other branded products. Using these effects, we can calculate advertising elasticity as the percentage change in a brand’s sales due to a 1% change in the brand’s digital signage investment.

We find an elasticity of .18 for digital signage; 50% greater than the empirical generalizations of short-term brand advertising elasticities equal to .12 reported by Hanssens (2015) and Sethuraman, Tellis, and Briesch (2011).

Me: I don’t know what that all means …

Proximity to the POS and the unique features of digital signage likely induce these higher elasticities. Considering the costs of exposure (i.e., how much a brand manufacturer pays for 1,000 exposures) and additional sales minus the retailer’s markup, we estimate that a brand manufacturer would earn an average gross return on investments in digital signage of 21%.

Implications for retailers

For retailers, digital signage requires investments in the digital screens, RFID readers, RFID tags in shopping carts, and IT infrastructure. The retailer in our study equipped each store with five digital screens, five RFID readers at the screens, a RFID reader at every cashier, and RFID tags in all shopping carts.

To recoup these investments, the retailer needs the additional revenue from the average gross profit margin of around 3% on additional purchases and the advertising revenue from the brand manufacturers (i.e., the money the retailer receives per 1,000 exposures). Considering the ongoing costs of the system, the digital signage installation in our study would break even for the retailer after approximately one to two years, depending on the percentage of campaigns for its own brand and for manufacturing brands, and provide additional profit afterwards.

Our data further suggest that 87.7% of the additional revenue stems from digital signage and only 12.3% from the additional sales, confirming the value of digital signage. These insights can be used by retailers to determine how much they charge brand manufacturers for in-store advertising with digital signage and to develop their pricing and price optimization models.

Implications for digital signage providers

Advertising delivery through digital signage has not been optimized yet. During our study period, the digital signage system did not use any targeting, nor did any other targeting or optimization efforts take place. This scenario benefited our effort to identify causal effects, but it also indicates that the vast potential for optimization has not been tapped.

The digital signage provider we collaborated with plans to leverage our findings to target shoppers and optimize the effectiveness of its digital signage. Increasing the effectiveness of digital signage will enhance the average gross return for brand manufacturers’ expenditures, allow the retailer to charge a higher price for exposures to digital signage, and shorten the time until investments in digital signage pay off.

This is compelling stuff. We’ve had years of vendors insisting digital signage sells, but there’s not been a lot of good data to back that up. This peer-reviewed study offers proof, and has the great benefit of coming from academics, not vendors with sales quotas and inventory.

The core takeaways:

• don’t slap screens everywhere;
• use insights to pick the right products, times, spots, and messages;
• think about optimal timing;
• and lean to emotional, because it can disrupt self-control.

If you’re in retail media or selling software and hardware into that vertical, this is something worth reading. And the good news, it seems to be free.