Best Buy is making a push to get more advertising in its physical stores. The electronics retailer held an event last week to highlight new ad solutions from its in-house creative agency. Selling ads is generally much more lucrative than selling stuff, so a lot of retailers have styled themselves as media networks in recent years.

The most successful model by far is Amazon, and that’s what most retailers have been trying to imitate: selling banner ads or sponsored search results when you browse their sites online. But big box retailers like Best Buy have a lot of real estate in-store too, and they’re not about to let it go to waste.

Stores have been selling advertising for decades, but it’s generally been pretty analog.

”What goes right at the checkout counter, where you're waiting and you can impulsively grab something? Very often, that's held by manufacturers, by brands,” said Koen Pauwels, a professor of marketing at Northeastern University.

Now stores are looking to replicate what they’ve done online, but in real life — where consumers still make 80% of their purchases said Sarah Marzano, an analyst at E-Marketer.

“There's this massive potential that really hasn't been effectively tapped into,” said Marzano.

That is, the potential for ads that literally follow you around like in the science fiction film “Minority Report,” where there is a barrage of personalized billboards and virtual shopping assistants at every turn.

Retailers aren’t scanning our retinas yet, but they are getting more sophisticated at tracking how effective ads are in-store.

“We have a sensor at every screen, and we use a millimeter wave sensor to see that, yes, this person was in front of the screen, and then they also made a transaction,” said Ben Reynolds at digital signage company Stratacache. 

Serving ads can be more costly in person than online because retailers need hardware to display them, potentially in thousands of locations. But Best Buy already has plenty of that.

“You can provide a very high-quality surround sound experience for the customer right from the door,” said Kirthi Kalyanam, a retail management professor at Santa Clara University.

Best Buy said it will be offering store “takeovers” — blanketing the space with ads for a single brand. That, Kalyanam said, is much harder to ignore than the cluttered banner ads on a webpage.