Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except that moving inventory, and to a lesser extent generating repeat business, is more critical than ancillary ad revenue. If The screens don’t work or the ads aren’t effective, and I don’t open the door to get those high-margin also-bought drinks than they definitely do not achieve the store’s goal.
The shoppers are already in the store, presumably to buy from their list. Now the store gets a cut of an ad and the profit from the sale it makes. The digital delivery is going to be amazing for A/B testing of ads because they are going to have near immediate feedback. It's pretty clever in a dystopian hellscape kind of way.
This isn't really how it works.
If it worked that way then lighting, music, display organization, cleanliness, shelf space, brand, packaging etc. 'would not matter'.
All of those things matter, immensely, at any real scale.
The kinds of comments I'm seeing here are a little bit uncomfortable in this regard, indicate a kind of lack of self-awareness as to consumer (i.e. our own) behaviours.
This is just one of any number of studies [1]
THE EFFECT OF SHELF DISPLAY ON PURCHASING DECISION
"The final results show that, even though the students know that they should act like rational buyers who choose products according to their intrinsic value, when describing how they act in real situations, they admit to behaving differently, in the sense that they are influenced in one way or another by marketing policies ..."
This is not revelatory or controversial, we've known this for a long time.
These 'fancy displays' have a very obvious advantage purely in terms of their clarity and impact, and of course the reduce pain of having to constantly tweak tags and pricing.
Distracting advertising and any kind of privacy invasion would be a drawback obviously. As would possibly the cost.
But this looks like a really obvious opportunity to test for retail.
My worry would be not so much any of the stated issues here, but that there would be a new kind of war for retail space and that brands would bid on the size of their placements on the screen, as opposed to their slot on the shelf. Just ugly and unnecessary operational overhead.
[1] https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...