Currys and LG Take Retail Media Beyond the Site

Currys is the UK's leading omnichannel retailer for technology, and LG is one of its flagship electronics suppliers.

Both have run endemic retail media together for years across Currys. But as customer discovery increasingly starts on channels outside of a retailer’s control, like AI search and social media, retailers have to consider ways of influencing all the intent that’s building long before a customer arrives at their sites and apps.

Awin worked with Currys to answer a tough question: what does retail media look like when it moves off-site, and how early in the journey can it start influencing a purchase?

The challenge

Currys' retail media network lets suppliers invest in high-performing campaigns across its website and app. It’s a standard ‘right place, right time’ play. Customers browse a category like ‘TVs’ and see a placement for a brand like LG.

But to help Currys’ brands stay visible in an increasingly fragmented journey, it needed to activate supplier budgets off-site through a broad mix of partners.

Currys picked LG's TV range for the biggest test yet, setting an ambitious November target of £860k in campaign revenue. The launch date of a competitive peak trading period gave the campaign little room for error.

The solution

Having already run 50+ off-site retail media campaigns together in 2025, Awin and Currys had a clear picture of which partners actually converted attention into revenue.

The plan was to tap Awin’s diverse partner network to broaden LG’s campaign reach and strengthen Currys’ existing retail media ecosystem.

Widening the partner mix

Previous off-site campaigns had leaned heavily on editorial and content partners for reach. To maintain at least part of the winning formula, editorial houses such as Future and The Independent produced trustworthy LG TV reviews to build upper-funnel awareness.

These were placed on niche yet authoritative sites like Tom’s Guide and T3, well-known and trusted within the consumer electronics space.

Upper-funnel awareness was supported by display remarketing campaigns with other content publishers, keeping Currys visible to those that had viewed an LG TV on the retailer’s site.

Cashback and voucher partners then converted that attention into sales, giving Currys and LG a way to respond to competitive Black Friday pricing without discounting on-site in the view of customers that would have bought anyway.

In a first for Currys, a Buy Now, Pay Later partner in Zilch was also signed up to reduce abandonment through flexible payment options—an important touch, given the low consumer confidence going into Black Friday 2025.

Scaling through existing relationships

Because Awin's partner agreements were already in place, Currys didn't need to contract individually with every partner. It quickly launched with nine partners, nearly double the original target of five, without adding piles of extra work.

The result was an off-site ecosystem built to mirror the full customer journey rather than one point, as is the case with traditional retail media.

Editorial for discovery, display for re-engagement, BNPL for friction removal, and incentives for conversion: all activated on a single platform.

The results

Static retail media can only ever catch a shopper at one stage. A genuinely diverse partner mix can guide them from the earliest moment of interest through to checkout.

• Reach: 6.3 million impressions were secured against a 4 million goal (+58%). Each content piece averaged 6.6k views, well above the 4k benchmark from prior campaigns. Currys also saw a halo effect, with uplift in adjacent product categories beyond TVs.
• Revenue: The LG campaign was responsible for £890k in revenue over November against an £860k target (+4%), achieved despite a tougher economic backdrop.

Currys’ creative response to evolving challenges in retail shows what happens when a diversified, off-site ecosystem interacts with customers while they’re at the start of their journey, not the end.

As discovery keeps shifting further from any one retailer's own site, retail media has to evolve with it. The affiliate channel’s full-funnel coverage is just the solution.

Explore endemic supplier-funded activities with Currys, like LG did. Or follow in its footsteps by creating your own retail media business on Awin.