ASPACE attended NRF: Retail’s Big Show 2026 in New York City together with long-standing retail technology partner Visual Art, presenting ASPACE Vision™ to a global audience of retailers, brand leaders and technology partners. NRF is the world’s largest retail event and the central meeting point for the industry’s conversation about customer experience, store technology and the future of physical retail. For ASPACE, the show was an opportunity to demonstrate how privacy-safe, AI-powered measurement can turn in-store screens from operational signage into accountable, monetisable media and to take that conversation directly to the decision-makers shaping the next generation of retail.
The dialogue at this year’s show made one thing clear: the demand to bring digital-grade precision into the physical store is stronger than ever. Retailers across markets are reaching the same conclusion at roughly the same time. Which is that footfall alone no longer answers the questions their teams, their boards and their advertising partners are asking. Who is actually in the store. How long do they stay in front of a given screen. Which placements deliver real attention and which ones don’t. These are the questions ASPACE Vision™ was built to answer and they were at the centre of every conversation across the three days.
To make the case concrete, ASPACE brought in-store measurement directly onto the floor as a proof point. Across just three screens over three days, ASPACE Vision™ measured 17,371 Real Accurate Contacts, 18.7 hours of total active engagement and an audience composition where 36% sat in the 35–44 age bracket. Translated into media value, those three screens generated $86 per day in gross media value, which at retail-store scale, projects to roughly $31,200 per year in new, passive revenue from screens the retailer already owns. For most of the retailers stopping by the booth, that calculation reframed how they thought about the screens already deployed in their stores: not as a cost line, but as an underused media asset.
Beyond the booth, the broader signal from NRF 2026 was a category in transition. Retail media is no longer a future trend, it is a current line item in advertiser budgets and the brands now investing in it expect the same standard of measurement they get from digital. Closing that gap requires infrastructure that is rigorous, Privacy by Design and built specifically for physical environments. That is exactly the position ASPACE has spent the past several years building toward and being at NRF together with Visual Art was a clear signal that the conversation is moving in our direction.
We left New York with new partnerships in motion, sharper conviction in the product roadmap and a renewed sense of why this work matters. The physical store, properly measured, is one of the most powerful media channels in the world. The question we kept asking on the floor is the one we’ll keep asking after: are retailers monetising their true attention yet?
ASPACE is a Stockholm-based adtech company specialising in Privacy by Design, AI-powered audience measurement for DOOH and in-store Retail Media. ASPACE Vision™ is deployed across out-of-home and retail environments in Sweden and internationally, providing real-time, verified campaign data through the FACIT analytics platform.
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