Walgreens puts screens in 1,200 pharmacies

In the second week of September 2026, Walgreens said it will add digital screens carrying advertising and educational content to 1,200 stores, starting in October, in partnership with the in-store media firm Looma. Each participating store gets two large screens (one near the front of the store, one in the pharmacy waiting area) plus digital end caps. Trade coverage puts completion in early 2027. The plan was announced by John Storms, Walgreens’ VP of digital and retail media, and reported by Modern Retail on 11 September.

Most of that is ordinary in-store retail media: screens at the entrance and screens at the shelf. One placement is different. The pharmacy waiting area is not a place people walk past. They stand or sit there until their name is called, which makes it a dwell zone inside a store built for browsing. And beauty is on the list of content categories Walgreens wants to fill.

What's happening

1,200 Walgreens stores get Looma screens from October 2026, with rollout reported to complete by early 2027 (Modern Retail, 11 Sep — primary quote; Chain Store Age, 8 Sep — directional).
Per store: two large screens, near the front and in the pharmacy waiting area, plus digital end caps that can spotlight a single brand or show Looma-produced educational content (Modern Retail — directional).
Content categories named include beauty, personal care, grocery, pharmacy and wellness (Modern Retail — directional).
Looma’s network: 7,000+ screens across 10 banners, reaching 13 million unique shoppers a month (Kroger, H-E-B, Harris Teeter, BJ’s Wholesale) (Looma figures via Modern Retail — directional).
Pitched on full-funnel metrics “rather than just on how often the ad played”, with content meant to “educate rather than interrupt” (Modern Retail — directional).
Storms: “We are focusing on better placements, higher-performing placements — not only online, but in-store.” (Modern Retail — primary quote)

What happened

This is Walgreens’ second go at in-store screens. The first, the Cooler Screens programme, put screens on fridge doors from 2018 and ended in a lawsuit in 2023 that Modern Retail describes as a $200 million dispute. The new plan reads as a correction on three counts. It moves from a single novelty surface to placements chosen for where attention is. It uses a vendor with an existing multi-retailer network rather than a bespoke build. And it leads with outcome measurement rather than play counts.

The competitive pressure is visible in the same report. CVS has digital end caps in more than 600 stores, about 11,000 digital screens nationally and checkout ads in about 7,000 stores. The US drugstore floor is becoming media inventory whichever chain you walk into, which is the pattern our retail media vs place-based DOOH analysis described: in-store retail media is place-based DOOH under another owner.

What it means for beauty

The drugstore is a beauty shelf, and now it has a screen beside it. Walgreens names beauty and personal care among its content categories, and the end caps are built to feature one brand next to its product. For a beauty brand, that is a new point-of-purchase buy inside a mass channel. It competes for the same “reach shoppers in store” budget that we tracked in June.
The waiting-area screen is the pharmacy’s version of the salon chair. It is a point-of-wait placement: a visitor held in place for a service, facing a screen. That is the structural argument beauty DOOH has always made, and a national chain is now paying to build it. Modern Retail also cites a March 2026 Grocery TV survey of more than 1,000 shoppers finding people more receptive to ads in the pharmacy than elsewhere in the store. No figure was published, so treat it as a signal, not a benchmark.
But a pharmacy wait is not an appointment. A prescription pickup is a queue of minutes; a colour service is hours in a fixed seat with a known client. Our dwell benchmarks put the salon window at the appointment, and our work on why long dwell is not long attention shows that placement, not duration alone, turns dwell into looking. The salon keeps the deeper context; Walgreens has the scale.
The measurement bar just moved again. “Full-funnel, not how often the ad played” is now the opening line of a drugstore pitch. A salon network selling to the same beauty buyer will get the same question, and the honest small-network answer is still QR and O2O attribution done carefully.

The caveat that keeps us honest

This is an announced plan, not a working network. No rollout data, audience figures for the Walgreens screens, pricing or launch advertisers have been published. The Looma network numbers are vendor figures. The “early 2027” completion date comes from Chain Store Age coverage we could not open in full, and Storms’ own LinkedIn announcement was not reviewed directly. Walgreens’ first screen programme ended in litigation, so execution risk is real. The guide on beauty DOOH vs in-store retail media explains why a retailer’s floor and an independent venue network are different businesses even when the screens look alike. Nothing beauty-specific is asserted here beyond what the linked Research supports.