A Global Industry First Eye-Tracking Retail Solution

As the UK’s first retail media network in the convenience sector, Co-op Media Network gives brands the opportunity to leverage the extensive scale of Co-op’s nationwide estate of frequently-visited stores, providing media placements in front of their 16m+ unique weekly shopper transactions. While the sales impact is easy to demonstrate, its role in brand building is more challenging to quantify.

The challenge was to deep-dive into the level of attention achieved and to investigate the hypothesis of whether smaller stores actually have an advantage at capturing attention and turning it into brand uplift. This is brand new thinking within the retail sector that has never been analysed before and the insights would be the blueprint for Co-op to optimise their in-store media strategy for brands.

Teaming up with industry attention experts Lumen Research in a global retail first, shoppers navigated either a small or large store, on a BBQ shopping mission – engaging with a mixture of categories from protein, produce, frozen, ambient and BWS – while wearing eye-tracking glasses. These devices monitored what the shoppers were viewing, the duration of their gaze and retinal movements. This provided precise insights into what they were observing and offered an understanding of which advertisements were within their peripheral vision. It also assessed viewability and opportunities to see, indicating where advertisements could have been seen without direct focus.

The results are a game-changer for marketers revealing that small stores provide over twice the OTS, triple the attention and quadruple brand recall.