QSIC launches Playbook for store-level campaign planning

QSIC has launched Playbook, an in-store campaign planning tool for retailers and brands that forecasts campaign outcomes using store-level sales data.

Playbook is designed to help advertisers and retailers decide how to allocate in-store media spending before a campaign begins. Using point-of-sale data, it recommends campaign strategies, identifies stores with the strongest expected return and projects likely sales results.

The launch reflects a broader push across retail media to tie advertising decisions more closely to sales outcomes rather than audience estimates. In-store media has often been planned using footfall projections, panel data and impression-based metrics, making it harder for brands to judge whether a campaign is likely to lift sales in specific locations.

According to QSIC, Playbook analyses historical campaign performance, product trends and audience insights alongside retailer sales data. The company says this allows the system to produce campaign proposals based on products already selling in individual stores, with average forecasting accuracy of about 90%.

The product sits within QSIC Intelligence, the company's wider in-store data platform. Alongside a performance measurement system, it forms part of a single workflow that allows clients to plan and assess campaigns against the same sales data set.

QSIC says Playbook can generate proposals through natural language prompts. Users describe the campaign they want to run, and the system creates a media plan with recommended stores, demand trends, shopper insights and projected sales performance.

The tool is already being used internally by QSIC's account teams for campaigns with retailers in grocery, liquor and convenience. That suggests it has moved beyond a pilot phase and is being applied in live commercial settings, although QSIC did not disclose customer names or financial terms.

Sales focus

QSIC is positioning the product around a longstanding question in retail advertising: whether a campaign will sell more product rather than simply attract attention. That focus places Playbook in a part of the retail media market where advertisers are under growing pressure to justify spending with measurable commercial results.

Retail media has become one of the fastest-growing segments of advertising, but much of that growth has centred on online channels, where clicks and conversions are easier to track. Physical stores remain a more difficult environment for planners because campaign reach does not always translate directly into purchases, and local differences in inventory, shopper behaviour and store performance can significantly alter outcomes.

By using store-level data, QSIC is seeking to narrow that gap. Instead of treating a retail estate as a single audience pool, the planning model attempts to rank individual locations by where a campaign is most likely to succeed.

Matt Elsley, co-founder and chief executive officer of QSIC, outlined the company's rationale for the launch.

"Every Brand asks the same question before investing in a campaign: 'Will this actually sell more product?' Until now, in-store media hasn't had a good answer. QSIC Intelligence is analyzing sales, loyalty and retail media data down to the store level, at a scale no one else has, and it's surfacing patterns the industry has never been able to see. The most striking: most campaigns are won or lost before they ever launch. That's what we built Playbook to solve, and it's already predicting campaign outcomes at around 90% accuracy, so retailers and brands are seeing the benefit at scale right now," he said.

Wider network

QSIC operates in-store audio media and says its network reaches more than 350 million shoppers each month globally. The company uses first-party retail data and artificial intelligence to measure how audio advertising at the point of purchase influences buying decisions.

That scale matters because in-store media remains fragmented, with many retailers operating their own systems and advertisers often lacking standardised planning tools. A product that links media placement to till and loyalty data could appeal to retailers trying to build more accountable media businesses within their store estates.

For brands, the promise is greater certainty before money is committed. For retailers, the attraction is the prospect of showing advertisers projected sales outcomes at the planning stage rather than relying chiefly on reach estimates.