From Local Impressions to Local Sales

How a £300 retail media activation helped SPAR Scotland turn its local social audiences into valuable advertising inventory - while giving Cruzcampo a cost-efficient way to drive awareness and sales of its new Sevilla Orange drink.

Retail media works best when it creates value for everyone involved;
- for supplier brands, that means reaching relevant shoppers efficiently and demonstrating a measurable impact on sales
- for retailers, it means monetising their customer relationships and generating new revenue from digital assets they already own.
A recent campaign for NEW Cruzcampo Sevilla Orange across participating SPAR Scotland stores demonstrates how both sides of that equation can work together.

Using local store social media pages as retail media inventory, the campaign put Cruzcampo's new product in front of shoppers in the communities surrounding the stores where it was available. The campaign generated significant local reach, highly efficient media costs and a 58.6% increase in sales in the first week of advertising. Let’s show you how they did it: 

Turning SPAR's local audiences into retail media inventory

Retailers have an increasingly valuable digital asset: their relationship with local customers. Every store social media page represents a community of consumers who live, shop and engage around that location. Traditionally, these pages have primarily been used to promote the store itself. Retail media creates another opportunity - allowing supplier brands to access these audiences through sponsored content and paid advertising.

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For Cruzcampo, this meant being able to take one campaign and activate it across participating local SPAR pages, putting "Choose the taste of Sevilla" in front of consumers in the areas where the product was actually available.

The campaign therefore delivered both scale and local relevance - reaching almost 300,000 people while keeping the media geographically connected to participating stores.

A more efficient proposition for supplier brands

The efficiency of the campaign was particularly significant. The £0.26 CPC was substantially below UK retail and ecommerce benchmarks of approximately £0.50-£0.95, while the £0.24 CPE was roughly half the £0.40-£0.70 benchmark cited in the campaign analysis.
The £2.53 fully loaded CPM was also significantly below typical national social media CPMs of around £4-£8.

For Cruzcampo, this demonstrates the potential of local retail media as an efficient alternative to buying broad national reach. Rather than paying to reach consumers who may not live near a store selling the product, the campaign connected media investment to specific local communities and stores.

That creates a compelling proposition for supplier brands: high-volume reach, geographically relevant audiences and efficient media costs - with the additional opportunity to connect campaign activity to physical sales.

But the value doesn't stop with the supplier

The same efficiency that makes local pages attractive to brands also creates a valuable commercial proposition for SPAR Scotland. The retailer already has the social pages. It already has the local audiences. It already has the relationships with shoppers. Retail media allows those existing digital assets to become advertising inventory that can be sold to supplier brands.

The more efficiently those pages can deliver reach and engagement, the more attractive they become to advertisers. And because the infrastructure and audience already exist, retailers can generate incremental media revenue without needing to build a new physical retail media estate. This creates a powerful commercial model:

1. Supplier brands get efficient access to local shoppers.
2. Retailers monetise their existing digital audiences. 
3. Local stores benefit from increased awareness and demand.
4. Shoppers see relevant products through stores they already know and trust.

From digital reach to physical sales

The strongest evidence of the campaign's success, however, came from what happened in stores. During the advertising week, unit sales increased by 58.6% compared with the previous week.

The campaign also included 18 control stores that did not have local social media pages or receive the advertising. These stores recorded zero sales across the three-week observation period.

The strongest-performing region delivered an even more significant result, with sales increasing by 300% week-on-week.

For Cruzcampo, this moves the campaign beyond a traditional awareness metric. The objective wasn't simply to get the Sevilla Orange creative in front of consumers. It was to reach people where the product was available and influence what happened next in store.

A win for both sides of the retail media equation

What makes this campaign particularly interesting is that its success can be viewed from two different perspectives.

For Cruzcampo: efficient, relevant media with a sales outcome

The campaign provided a cost-efficient way to introduce a new product to almost 300,000 people, with CPC, CPE and CPM performance below the relevant market benchmarks.
More importantly, sales increased by 58.6% during the advertising period.
Local retail media therefore gave Cruzcampo something that traditional national advertising can struggle to provide: a direct connection between media exposure, local store availability and product sales.

“At HEINEKEN, we're always looking for innovative ways to connect our brands with shoppers. The Cruzcampo Sevilla Orange campaign with SPAR Scotland demonstrated the power of hyper-local retail media, delivering a 58.6% sales uplift in the first week of activation. It shows how targeted local engagement can drive shoppers into store, convert awareness into purchases and create value for both retailer and supplier.”

Jay Patel, Customer Account Director, HEINEKEN

For SPAR Scotland: a new commercial asset

For SPAR Scotland, the campaign demonstrated that local social media pages are more than communication channels for individual stores. They can become scalable retail media inventory. A network of engaged local audiences can be packaged and sold to supplier brands, creating a new revenue stream while simultaneously supporting the products stocked in those stores.
And the opportunity grows as the retailer's local audience grows. Every new follower, every new local community and every additional store page can increase the potential inventory available to brands - creating a retail media network built around the retailer's existing digital footprint.

The future of retail media is local

Traditional retail media has often focused on physical assets: shelf-edge advertising, posters, wobblers, in-store radio and other points of sale. Digital retail media expands that opportunity beyond the physical store.

Retailers can now monetise the customer attention and local relationships that exist around every location, reaching shoppers before they enter the store and influencing purchase decisions while the product is available on the shelf.

The Cruzcampo Sevilla campaign demonstrates the potential of this model in practice. For the supplier brand, £300 generated more than 309,000 impressions, 1,166 clicks and a 58.6% sales uplift.

For the retailer, the campaign demonstrated that its local social audiences can become a valuable advertising product - one that can generate supplier-funded revenue while helping drive demand for products sold through its stores.

That's ultimately what makes local retail media different. It isn't just about selling impressions. It's about creating a commercial ecosystem where brands can reach the right shoppers, retailers can monetise the audiences they have built, and digital engagement can be connected to what happens in the physical store.

From local impressions to local sales - retail media can create value on both sides of the shelf.

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