Christian Skaarud is the Head of Media & Retail Media at Norwegian co-operative retailer Coop Norge, and is responsible for overseeing the retailer’s burgeoning retail media network.
Coop Norge is somewhat unusual in retail media in gearing its proposition primarily around in-store screens. Ahead of his appearance at CustomerX 2026, Skaarud sat down with Retail Media Age to explain his role and how Coop Norge came to build up its retail media proposition, as well as how it fits into the Norwegian grocery space, how the retailer measures success, and what challenges the team has encountered in getting advertiser buy-in.
Can you talk a bit about your day-to-day role and what it involves?
I’m Head of Media & Retail Media at Coop Norge, which means that on the one hand, I’m responsible for all kinds of investment in external media channels, while on the other, I’m building up our retail media business.
Most of my time these days is spent on retail media: we’ve built our retail media proposition from scratch and are hands-on about every detail, from visiting the stores to decide where we place each screen to making strategic decisions about how to bring our retail media product offering to market.
We don’t have a grocery ecommerce presence, and the value for advertisers definitely lies in the store. Retail media used to be very ecommerce-focused and sales-driven, but I now see it entering the conversation when retailers want to open up their ecosystem – and there are different products with different purposes within the retail media space.
For example, I’ve seen discussions on LinkedIn about accomplishing brand lift versus sales uplift with retail media, and I think that’s very interesting.
We do offer some digital products, but they’re more extra products on top of the in-store proposition.
How did you come to hold your current role, and what kind of background led you to work in retail media?
I previously worked in sales, and then I started working with CRM and one-to-one communication personalisation; that’s how I started out at Coop Norge as well.
We then started looking at how to apply the data principles that we were working with to media as well and as a result, my role changed from Head of CRM to Head of Data-Driven Marketing. We looked at how to utilise data across all the channels where we communicated with customers.
From there, I took on responsibility for media, and we started looking into retail media because we were curious and wanted to understand the possibilities; so we built a role around that in the company.
As a retailer with a primarily in-store proposition, do you feel as though there is a narrative in the retail media space that doesn’t quite fit what you do – because it’s not what most people think of when they hear ‘retail media’?
Yes, I’d say so – but in Norway, we’re positioning ourselves as the ones setting a precedent by going into this space first and taking it on as a strategic initiative.
So, we need to teach the Norwegian market about retail media, about what the different products are and about how it can help them. The expectations from media agencies and advertisers are all very different. Some expect a branding campaign – others are expecting to see products flying off the shelves; and everything in between.
That’s probably the most difficult part of our job – trying to educate the market. But it’s also an opportunity for us to move the market to where we want it to be.
What is it that makes the Norwegian market unique, and how does Coop Norge’s proposition fit into that?
When it comes to grocery shopping, Norway is quite different to most other countries – we tend to use the store as our refrigerator. We shop three to four times every week because we have a tremendous number of stores.
The shopping frequency and the accessibility of stores in Norway is quite unique. However, one thing that’s challenging is that there’s no clear definition of exactly what ‘retail media’ is. Different markets have different definitions of what activities shopper marketing is compared to retail media.Looking at the UK market, for example, a lot of what they define as retail media we consider shopper marketing. e Our primary focus is to position ourselves as a media channel,making media agencies our primary customer.
In the future, we may well merge these closer together; but for now, to get off on the right foot, we try to have clear boundaries around what we think is retail media and what we think is shopper marketing.
All our advertisers have one budget; how they choose to split that budget is up to them, but for us, it’s important that this won’t replace the value of having in-store end cap displays or stickers or promotions, because that’s a different channel with a different purpose.
What has been your biggest challenge in unlocking the full potential of retail media for advertisers?
In retail media, we talk a lot about data, and it means the expectations on us compared with other media channels are much higher when it comes to reporting.
At Coop Norge we have a tremendous amount of data, from impressions on in-store screens thanks to our sensors through to our membership data, which can tell you who’s been in the store at that time; we can also provide a lot of data on the demographics of visitors to each store, and we can of course offer sales data.
However, it can be challenging to narrow down what truly influences sales, as well as to set a concrete reference point – shopping patterns are very different in the summer versus around Christmas, around Easter, or around our national day. So, it means we need to find a way to make that process more accessible when it comes to reporting, or to automate it.
The other challenge is in educating the market. There’s a lot of interest in testing our proposition – and when you test something, you also want proof that it’s delivering.
Because we want to roll out our retail media offering in the best possible way, we’ve been scaling it up step by step: doing pilots, adjusting, rolling out the first ten stores, doing eye-tracking surveys to gauge shopping behaviour and learn how it varies between different store formats. This affects how we think about placing the screens.
But I think a lot of advertisers are waiting for a large enough product – they want the widest possible coverage and they want results from the start rather than being a part of the pilot and testing base.
On 15th October, you’ll be speaking at CustomerX as part of a Think Tank session on in-store retail media. Can you sum up the session in a nutshell and why it’s a must-attend?
We really believe that in-store retail media is only going to grow in importance going forward. We see that more and more markets are moving into in-store – in the US, for example, there’s now a lot of investment into it.
What I’m bringing to the session will be the learnings from implementing our retail media proposition over the past year – what’s gone well, what’s been more challenging, and how we try to approach our in-store offering in the same way as digital. Our sensors allow us to track impressions in a very similar way to how impressions are tracked online – so, we can make this data available regardless of whether it’s a physical or a digital retail media channel.
I’m speaking alongside Michele Dainty, Shopper Marketing Director at Pladis Global, and Sophy Ansell, Group Director of Retail Media UK/EMEA at Mood Media, and our session will be invaluable for anyone who wants to better understand the value that in-store retail media can bring.
