Digest: store screens now sell audiences, not airtime
Three September items from three continents: 1,300 store-entrance screens bundled into one Australian network, a German grocery network made programmatic with purchase-linked measurement, and Osaka Station screens sold on viewed impressions. Each one packages in-store screens as an audience with a number on it, not as slots on a schedule.
Three in-store and indoor network announcements landed in the week of 16–17 September 2026, in Australia, Germany and Japan. None is a beauty story. All three make the same change, though: they stop selling screens as airtime and start selling them as a counted audience. QMS has bundled 1,300+ store entrances into one national product quoted in weekly impressions. One Tech Group has made Cyreen’s ~1,000 grocery screens bookable programmatically, one screen at a time, with a metric that links exposure to purchase. LIVE BOARD will sell 40 screens in Osaka Station on estimated viewed impressions from 28 September. A beauty network will be asked to sell itself the same way.
Australia: 1,300 store doors, one product
SHOP is a roll-up. Nine’s out-of-home arm QMS has represented Metcash’s LocalEyes screens since 1 September. Those screens sit in independent stores trading under shared banners: IGA, Cellarbrations, The Bottle-O, Mitre 10 and Total Tools, among others. QMS has now added 470 screens at 7-Eleven entrances and packaged the lot as one national point-of-purchase network. The pitch has two parts: a weekly impression total (16m+) and proximity (70%+ of Australians within 3 km). QMS chief sales officer Tim Murphy calls it “the realisation of the company’s Sofa to Store ambition”.
For beauty: this is the clearest recent template for selling independents. A single IGA screen could never be sold to a national brand on its own. As part of 860 others, behind a broadcaster’s sales team and quoted as one audience, it can. Independent salons have the same problem: local, frequently visited, and individually unsellable. This is also the placement argument from our retail media vs place-based DOOH research: the screen at the door catches the shopper at the last moment before purchase. The Asia-Pacific market brief covers the Australian context.
Germany: screen-level programmatic, with purchase attached
Cyreen’s network runs across RTG-Media retailers (Bartels-Langness, Bünting, Georg Jos. Kaes, Globus, Netto) plus Progetränke and independents. It is now bookable through SSP1 from a DSP, down to a single screen, while direct orders go through Adserver1. RTG-Media itself is still sold exclusively by Laya Group. The unusual part is the measurement that comes with it. C.A.P. (“Connecting Ad Impressions with Purchase”) uses RFID on trolleys to log, anonymously, which screens a shopper passed, then matches that to the till to estimate incremental sales. Cyreen CEO Ciril Hofmann says the network “can be booked automatically and at scale, across several retailers and through one access point”.
For beauty: here a small, fragmented network gets both halves of what buyers ask for at once: programmatic access and an outcome metric. One Tech Group also runs Rossmann’s retail media (announced in January), so the same pipes already reach a drugstore shelf. A salon has no trolleys, but it does have a booking system and a till. At salon scale, the honest route to an outcome number is still QR and O2O attribution, and programmatic availability still has a long way to go, as our programmatic share of DOOH tracker shows.
Japan: selling the people who actually looked
From 28 September, the Osaka Station screens (19 hours a day, no audio) can be bought in two ways: the traditional period-and-frequency booking, or LIVE BOARD’s VAC (Visibility Adjusted Contact) impressions. VAC starts from NTT Docomo location data to count people in the viewable area (OTS). It then adjusts for direction of travel and obstructions (OTC) and applies a viewability rate from a venue survey. The result is an estimate of how many people actually saw the ad. LIVE BOARD says its marketplace now covers 61,500+ screens, and it keeps adding third-party owners like this one.
For beauty: the lesson is what a venue should publish. Raw footfall is the weakest number a salon, spa or clinic can give a buyer. A count adjusted for sightlines, obstruction and viewability is the stronger one. That is also why no two vendors’ impressions are directly comparable, as our impression multiplier reference explains. For long-dwell rooms, being seen and being attended to are different things; our research on why long dwell is not long attention covers the difference.
The thread, and the caveat
All three networks have made the same move. The in-store screen is no longer sold as a slot on a schedule. It is sold as an audience with a number on it: impressions for QMS, purchases for Cyreen, viewed contacts for LIVE BOARD. They get there at different depths. SHOP adds up impressions, Cyreen ties exposure to the till, and VAC models who looked. The buyer’s question is the same each time, and a beauty network will face it too: how many people, and what did they do?
The caveat is that every audience and outcome figure here comes from the company selling it. QMS has published no rate card and has not said how SHOP is bought. Cyreen’s C.A.P. method and incrementality results have not been independently audited. VAC is a model built on location data and a viewability survey, not a measurement, and the only source for it is LIVE BOARD’s Japanese-language release; we found no English trade coverage. None of the three networks is in beauty.
Related: Retail media vs place-based DOOH · QR & O2O attribution · Programmatic share of DOOH · The impression multiplier, explained · OOH measurement currency map · Retailers move to own the in-store screen