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Enter Retail Origins, a new solution that looks at mobility and store visitation data, offering a relatively unexplored approach compared to traditional retail media networks. Designed primarily for high-footfall locations like shopping malls, grocery stores, and quick-service restaurants (QSR), Retail Origins focuses on identifying and contextualizing the real-world journeys of your customers.

Here is why this matters: a store's location may be permanent, but its opportunity to attract customers is not. Visitors come from different areas at different times, competitors gain and lose strength, and new openings reshape daily journeys. Traditional fixed-radius planning misses all of these vital shifts.

Retail Origins turns aggregated and anonymized visitor behavior into smart, local growth decisions. By breaking down the complexity of market mobility into logical steps, it empowers agencies and advertisers to answer three practical questions: Where can we steal share or defend existing demand? Who should we reach? And what changed after the campaign?

The Four Logical Steps to Smarter Growth

Retail Origins connects four crucial stages that are usually handled in silos by separate teams: Understand, Decide, Activate, and Learn.

1. Understand: Real Catchments, Not Arbitrary Radii

Every store (yours and your competitor) contests a unique market, and a store's real catchment is not an arbitrary radius. Retail Origins looks at where visitors actually come from by revealing origin areas and separating home and work patterns. By analyzing two key metrics, we can prioritize the areas that matter most:

• Visitor Index: Scores how important an area is in relation to a store total visitation. Share of Footfall: Measures how much of the visits you win in that area against your specific competitors.

2. Decide: Define Your Growth Battlegrounds

Because not every area is worth the same investment, Retail Origins turns the data from the 'Understand' phase into one of three strategic decisions for each catchment area:

• Conquest: High potential areas led by a competitor. The goal is to take share right where the choice is made.

• Grow: High potential areas where you already lead. The goal is to build demand and widen the gap.

• Defend: Established demand that is currently under pressure. The goal is to protect the visits you already hold.

Layered onto these battlegrounds is deep audience profiling. It moves the strategy from where to act to who to influence, what matters to them, and when they are most receptive. Beyond demographics and lifestyle preferences, incorporating competitive insights reveals who else the audience visits. Understanding these shared customer behaviors provides a critical competitive lens. For instance, discovering a significant imbalance - where a large portion of your shoppers also visit a key competitor - shifts the narrative requirement from building general brand awareness to actively breaking an established customer habit.

3. Activate: From Insight to Omnichannel Strategy

Your growth opportunity directly decides which media channel leads your investment.

• Conquest: Displace the Leader

  • Steal market share by giving competitor audiences a compelling reason to switch. Focused on driving conversions (KPI: Share gain), this strategy deploys proximity DOOH (~50%) to intercept decision-makers near competitor sites, CTV (~30%) to seed comparative messaging, and Display Video (~20%) to showcase product differentiators.

• Grow: Expand Consideration

  • Turn category interest into footfall by cementing your brand in daily routines. Targeted at top-of-funnel reach (KPI: New visitors), it uses broad-reaching CTV (~50%) for brand awareness, supporting Display (~30%) for ongoing touchpoints, and street-level DOOH (~20%) to convert interest into physical visits.

• Defend: Protect Your Turf

  • Safeguard first-choice status and make store visits automatic for existing customers. Built for retention (KPI: Visit frequency), it anchors on always-on DOOH (~50%) to maintain continuous presence, Display (~30%) to retarget loyal shoppers with rewards, and CTV (~20%) to reinforce brand affinity.

The strategy dictates the channel, ensuring every dollar is deployed logically based on the specific local battleground.

4. Learn: Quantify Real-World Store Outcomes

The final step moves beyond standard media delivery to quantify real store impact. Using store-centric footfall attribution for eligible channels (like Display, Online Video, and prDOOH), Retail Origins calculates the incremental visits your media helped create.

By reporting these store outcomes alongside competitive market changes. Retail Origins creates a continuous learning cycle where the end of one campaign seamlessly becomes the evidence base for the next. Location signals generated during and after activation are fed back into initial mobility signals, allowing consumer behavior to be compared before and after the campaign.

Beyond measuring media-driven incremental visits, this helps understand how each store’s competitive position has evolved - whether it gained Share of Footfall, altered visitor overlap, or shifted visitation patterns across battlegrounds. Ultimately, this determines if activation changed real-world behavior by attracting new visitors, gaining share, reducing leakage, or strengthening territories, turning those learnings into new signals for future strategies.

Smart Decision-Making Powered by Real Behavior

The true benefit of Retail Origins lies in bridging the gap between national brand strategy and hyper-local execution. By replacing static assumptions with dynamic mobility insights, it gives both national brand teams and local store marketers a shared, evidence-based roadmap. Advertisers and agencies can finally move beyond one-size-fits-all media plans, optimizing national retail support down to the precise catchments where it drives the greatest incremental volume, footfall, and market share.

Whether you need to grow around existing stores, defend valuable catchments, or support a new store opening, mobility data is the key to unlocking smarter retail decisions.

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