Special Edition: Best Buy Ads’ The Drop — CTV, TikTok Shop & What Comes After Sponsored Products

Commerce Media Minute

00:00 / 10:31

Best Buy Ads’ The Drop: CTV, TikTok Shop & What Comes After Sponsored Products

Commerce media is moving beyond the sponsored product ad.

In this special edition of Commerce Media Minute, Shaun Ayala looks at the public announcements and industry coverage coming out of Best Buy Ads’ annual event, The Drop—including developments across CTV, TikTok Shop, creators, in-store media and measurement.

Disclosure: Shaun works for Best Buy Ads. Commerce Media Minute is an independent ShaunAyala.com production and is not an official Best Buy or Best Buy Ads podcast. This episode is based entirely on publicly available announcements and published industry reporting.

Best Buy Ads expands further into CTV

Best Buy and Amazon are expanding a Fire TV relationship that dates back to 2018.

Beginning in February 2027, Best Buy Ads will use Amazon Ads’ programmatic technology, including AI-powered tools, to help brands plan, activate, optimize and measure advertising campaigns. Best Buy Ads will also gain access to Fire TV advertising inventory across new and existing Insignia TVs.

Amazon and Best Buy say their Fire TV relationship has brought televisions into tens of millions of homes since it began.

Modern Retail also reported on a broader offering called Best Buy CTV, which combines Best Buy shopper audiences, device-ownership data and purchase-intent signals with CTV inventory from partners including Amazon, Roku and LG.

The bigger question: What happens when commerce audiences and television advertising increasingly work together?

Best Buy heads to TikTok Shop

Best Buy plans to launch on TikTok Shop in late October with nearly 10,000 products from brands including Oura, Bose, Dyson and Microsoft.

Customers will be able to discover and purchase products through shoppable creator content, Best Buy’s TikTok Shop page and other in-app experiences, with orders fulfilled by Best Buy.

The announcement also creates new opportunities for brands to work with creators and connect content, commerce and measurement more closely.

Creators become part of the commerce experience

The creator story raises a broader question for commerce media.

Advertising traditionally starts by asking who should see the message?

Creators add another question:

Who does the customer actually want to hear from?

As content and shopping move closer together, the person explaining or recommending a product may become increasingly important to the commerce experience itself.

The physical store becomes media

The Drop coverage also points toward continued development of in-store advertising.

That’s interesting not simply because retailers can add more screens, displays or audio placements, but because physical media creates another measurement challenge:

What happened because somebody experienced it?

Did they notice the brand? Consider something new? Move somewhere else in the store? Eventually purchase?

Those questions become increasingly important as commerce media expands beyond digital placements.

And then comes measurement

CTV. Social commerce. Creators. In-store media. Digital advertising.

A shopper could potentially encounter several of those touchpoints before making a purchase.

That makes the underlying measurement question increasingly difficult—and increasingly important:

What did the advertising actually do?

Not simply which advertisement appeared closest to the transaction, but whether the advertising changed an outcome.

The takeaway

The individual announcements are interesting.

The connection between them may be even more important.

If there’s one thing to remember this week, it’s this: commerce media is moving beyond the sponsored product ad. The opportunity now is figuring out how audiences, media, shopping experiences and measurement can actually work together.