As the industry debates how to close the loop, ShopLiftr is showing what activation looks like in practice – fusing live trade-promotion data with programmatic media to bridge story and sale across grocery, convenience, and pharmacy. Its practical playbook for activation turns marketing theory into market reality through formats like L-Bar video, Tap-to-Map, and digital out-of-home (DOOH) – where awareness transforms into action and storytelling meets the register.
From Story to Sale: The ‘Barbell Value’ Model
‘Barbell Value’ is ShopLiftr’s creative philosophy – the idea that a single impression can deliver both brand persuasion and retail conversion when built on a balanced foundation of story and sale.
Each side of the “barbell” represents a fundamental marketing weight:
- The left plate carries the brand story – emotion, relevance and trust signals – everything that earns belief and premium permission.
- The right plate carries the retail signal – the live offer, the store location, the availability hook that drives immediate action.
Where traditional campaigns spread these functions across different media or moments, ShopLiftr’s approach unites them within one canvas, one impression, one system of measurement.
That unification comes to life in L-Bar dynamic video, a format first unveiled in ShopLiftr’s previous announcement. The L-Bar blends premium brand storytelling with a live, data-fed overlay displaying active offers, inventory status, or nearest store details – creating ‘Barbell Value’ in motion. It bridges upper-funnel trust and lower-funnel immediacy, lifting both ends of the impression at once.
“When we launched L-Bar, it was about bridging story and sale,” said Genevieve Castonguay, Director of Marketing at ShopLiftr. “With ‘Barbell Value’, we’re showing how that bridge becomes scalable – across formats, across retailers, across missions. It’s how brands can hold both ends of the barbell at once: story on the left, sale on the right, strength in the middle.”
Data That Drives Activation
ShopLiftr’s activation engine is powered by one of the most comprehensive trade-promotion databases in North America. According to the company’s recently released Q3 2025 Trade Promotions Report, ShopLiftr captured 445,663 unique promotions across U.S. and Canadian grocery banners, underscoring that promotional intensity remains elevated across the market.
This proprietary dataset enables ShopLiftr to dynamically inject live offers, availability logic, and nearest-store cues directly into its creative formats – ensuring every impression is not only personalized, but contextually relevant and retail-ready.
Rewriting the Rules of Retail Activation
In the U.S., mission-based shopping is rewriting channel strategy. Shoppers are no longer making one big trip – they’re making many small ones, driven by need, proximity, and value. C-stores and pharmacies have quietly become critical touchpoints for brands: 152,000 convenience stores handle over 80% of fuel sales and countless on-the-go purchases, while 40,000+ pharmacies now serve as hybrid health, beauty, and impulse destinations.
And according to Explorer Research (2025), 55% of convenience-store trips are quick “top-up” missions while 17%are “food-to-go” occasions – proof that these environments are increasingly about immediacy, relevance, and brand-driven moments.
ShopLiftr’s Tap-to-Map format connects directly to these moments. By displaying live store addresses and interactive map pins in an expandable unit, Tap-to-Map collapses the funnel from curiosity to conversion – helping brands drive measurable in-store traffic when intent is highest.
That same flexibility extends to place-based digital out-of-home ads. From gyms and gas stations to office towers and restaurants, ShopLiftr’s placements are contextually aligned with trip triggers – letting brands insert relevance at every stop of the shopper’s day.
Proof in Market: Dynamic Creative Drives Foot Traffic to C-Stores
ShopLiftr’s approach isn’t theoretical – it’s driving measurable results today. In a recent campaign for a lottery/entertainment brand, the platform’s Tap-to-Map dynamic display connected digital engagement directly to nearby convenience stores, turning awareness into real-world navigation.
In 6 weeks, the campaign delivered:
- 13.36% incremental visitation lift to participating c-stores
- 0.39% conversion rate from ad engagement to physical store visit.
- Peak visit times clustered in evenings and late-week periods, aligning with convenience shopping missions.
This activation proved how map-enabled creative collapses the funnel – reducing friction between discovery and purchase while providing clear evidence of in-store impact. By pairing real-time location data with dynamic creative, ShopLiftr delivered measurable retail outcomes in a category historically measured only by awareness metrics.
“In a space where trip frequency has been softening, proving incremental visits at the convenience-store level reframes what digital can do,” said Ian Clark, VP Sales at ShopLiftr. “This is retail agility in motion – dynamic data, localized creative, and provable foot traffic at scale.”
Beyond Grocery: The Next Frontier
For ShopLiftr, expansion into convenience and pharmacy isn’t diversification – it’s evolution. These channels are where modern value is lived: on-the-go, local, and mission-specific.
By fusing live retail data with creative formats that inform, persuade, and navigate, ShopLiftr is building the connective tissue between awareness and action – proving that full-funnel is no longer a buzzword, but a measurable outcome.
Full-Funnel: From Activation to Validation
For ShopLiftr, full-funnel means more than upper-and-lower creative alignment – it’s the integration of agility, activation, credibility, and validation. The company partners with industry leaders like ABCS Insights to measure the real impact of campaigns beyond engagement and reach, validating results at the household level through advanced statistical modeling and sales linkage.
By connecting ad exposure to verified in-store purchase behavior, this methodology quantifies incremental lift with precision, enabling brands and retailers to measure the true effect of dynamic creative – not just who saw it, but who acted.
“Full-funnel success requires more than creative agility – it demands proof at the register,” said Jerome Shimizu, Co-Founder and Chief Data Scientist at ABCS Insights. “Our household-level validation methodology ensures that every campaign can be tied to real purchase behavior, giving marketers the confidence to connect investment directly to outcomes.”
Ready to turn on agility with proof? Learn more & book a demo here
About ShopLiftr
ShopLiftr is a retail-agnostic, data-driven dynamic-creative platform built for CPGs and retailers. By combining live, store-level promotions with multilingual, programmatic display, video and DOOH ads – ShopLiftr drives measurable foot traffic, sales, and ROAS across display, video, and connected environments. Its proprietary North American promotions dataset spans 300+ U.S. and 50+ Canadian retailers, refreshed weekly with over 200,000 live deals to enable real-time retail agility at scale.
Contact:
Genevieve Castonguay, Director of Marketing | [email protected]
Ian Clark, VP of Sales | [email protected]
Sources: NACS / NIQ TDLinx 2025 U.S. Convenience Store Count; NACDS Industry Report 2025; Explorer Research 2025; ShopLiftr Internal Campaign Data 2025.
SOURCE ShopLiftr
