Beauty's screens aren't weak — they're unplanned

At its Retail Media Growth Summit this month, IAB UK landed on a line worth stealing: retail media isn’t underperforming — it’s under-planned. The channel works; the problem is that it enters the media plan too late, as a performance bolt-on bought after the strategy is set, rather than as a strategic layer planned in from the start. The proposed fix is to turn media planners from channel specialists into “growth orchestrators” who connect media, pricing, promotion, distribution and customer data. That diagnosis travels — and for the beauty place-based screens this site tracks, it travels with the volume turned up. Salon and spa inventory isn’t under-planned. For most buyers it’s un-planned: not late on the plan, not on the plan at all.

The diagnosis

“Retail media isn’t underperforming — it’s being under-planned.” IAB UK’s framing from its Retail Media Growth Summit 2026, arguing the constraint is planning, not performance (IAB UK, via trade coverage, 15 Jun 2026 — primary, qualitative).
The cause named: retail media enters planning cycles too late, after budgets and strategy are locked, so it can only mop up performance rather than shape the campaign (IAB UK summit — qualitative).
The proposed cure: planners as “growth orchestrators” connecting media, pricing, promotion, distribution and customer intelligence — i.e. plan the commerce surface in, don’t bolt it on (IAB UK summit — qualitative).
Read-across for us: beauty place-based DOOH (salons, spas, clinics) faces the same disease at a worse stage — most planners can’t bring it in late because it was never on their map to begin with.

”Under-planned” is the polite version of our problem

Retail media at least gets considered — usually late, usually as a lower-funnel afterthought, but it’s in the room. Beauty service-venue DOOH frequently isn’t. A planner building a campaign can name the big OOH owners, the major retail networks, the obvious DSP supply — and still have no line item for “the screens in front of someone sitting captive in a salon chair for 45 minutes.” That isn’t a performance verdict. Nobody ran the salon network and decided it underperformed. It simply never got planned, because it wasn’t discoverable at the moment the plan was built.

That’s why we keep insisting the binding constraint on beauty place-based isn’t whether the format is the fastest-growing slice of DOOH — it is — but whether a buyer can find it, scope it and slot it into the plan early enough to matter. Under-planned and un-planned are the same failure at two depths: media that works on contact but loses the budget battle before contact ever happens.

The fix is identical — plan it in at strategy

IAB UK’s answer to retail media is the right answer here too: move the decision upstream. For beauty DOOH that means two jobs, one for each side of the trade.

For operators: be plannable. A salon network only gets planned in early if a planner can understand it fast — a defined audience, a clear venue context, honest reach, and outcomes they can model. That’s the entire purpose of a media kit that sells and of presenting beauty as a deliberate line in the media mix, not a curiosity.
For buyers: treat it as a strategic layer. The “growth orchestrator” idea is exactly the lens that surfaces beauty inventory — someone whose job is to ask “where does this audience actually sit, captive and high-intent?” early in campaign planning, before the plan hardens around the usual surfaces.

The encouraging part is that the wider market is now arguing for this discipline. If retail media’s own trade body is telling planners to stop bolting commerce media on at the end, the cultural permission to consider place-based formats earlier is growing — and beauty service venues sit right at the captive, high-dwell end of that opportunity.

The caveat that keeps the categories straight

Retail media and beauty service-venue DOOH are not the same inventory class, and we don’t fold them together — in-store retail media lives inside stores, while salons and spas are service venues, a distinction we keep deliberately in retail media vs place-based DOOH and in the beauty-DOOH-vs-in-store-retail-media guide. So borrow the planning lesson, not the numbers: no retail-media spend figure transfers to a salon screen, and no beauty CPM is published to anchor one. We covered the conversion case for in-store beauty screens separately; this is the quieter, upstream point.

But it’s the one that decides budgets. The best beauty place-based network in the world loses to a network that no planner remembered to plan. “Under-planned, not underperforming” is the most useful sentence the retail-media world has handed us this year — because for beauty screens, getting onto the plan early is most of the battle.