Top 7 Retail Digital Signage Trends in 2025

In today’s fast-paced retail landscape, digital signage has become an essential tool for enhancing the customer experience, boosting sales, and creating personalised experiences. With brick-and-mortar stores still going strong according to Sony's Retail Audit 2024, the opportunity for this communication tool is enormous.

With 2025 just around the corner, it’s crucial to understand where the industry is headed to anticipate and adapt our strategies and ultimately, better meet consumer needs.

In this article, we’ll provide a complete overview to keep you ahead of the curve, whether you own a small store or you’re the Marketing Manager of a large shopping center. From retail media networks to AI-driven retail media planning, let’s explore the top seven digital signage trends you can expect to see over the next year.

1. Retail Media Networks (RMNs)

The rapid growth of the Retail Media Network is set to continue, with retail leaders such as Walmart, Amazon, and Target flourishing in their digital advertising businesses. Their strategy has paid off, with forecasts predicting as much as $67.28 billion in retail media ad spending in 2025. Tesco have even predicted that retail media will be bigger than TV advertising by the end of 2025. Of course, digital signage makes up a huge part of this pie, with brands increasingly eager to use these retailer’s display networks to reach consumers in a highly targeted way.

With a cloud-based CMS, retailers can now seamlessly schedule and manage content across their network with ease, increasing both their revenue and that of their brands. They can even make use of cutting-edge remote display management functionality to scale their network that much faster.

2. Retail Automation

Automation is impacting every facet of retail and digital signage is no exception. From streamlined checkout systems to smart inventory management, automation tools are set to continue to streamline operations, saving time and reducing human error. What’s more, they’ll also be invaluable for delivering timely and relevant content to customers. Providing customers with the information they need, when they need it, will be key to meeting their increased expectations.

Fortunately, digital signage solutions allow you to easily schedule different types of content at any time of day, and pull in live data no matter the use case. Need to update your content automatically, in real-time based on promotions/sales, weather conditions, or inventory levels? It can be as simple as adding a widget. An excellent way to free up time for your staff and enhance the in-store experience.

3. Smart Shelves

In today’s context of rapid automation and digitalisation, it’s only natural that traditional store shelving would follow suit. Smart shelves use a combination of sensors and other digital tools to track product availability, provide relevant product information, and overall improve the shopping experience.

Integrating seamlessly with digital signage, it becomes easy to display dynamic content based on what’s on the shelf, offering a real-time connection that helps customers make informed decisions. With the global smart shelves market expected to be worth $3.3 billion by 2025, it’s clear that they should be at the forefront of retailers' minds.

4. Interactive Experiences

This year’s Interactive Customer Experience (ICX) summit in North Carolina all but confirmed that delivering interactive experiences is still a top priority for retail decision-makers. Whether that’s via touch-enabled self-service kiosks or voice-activated displays and augmented reality (AR), it’s clear that they could be the answer for creating truly immersive and personalised shopping environments.

With a digital signage solution, you can easily create these interactive experiences and connect to a wide variety of third-party devices, whether sensors, cameras, or RFID scanners. You could even go a step further and design multi-sensory experiences. Let your creativity be the limit!

5. Programmatic Digital Out-Of-Home (pDOOH)

Another area poised for rapid growth in 2025 (particularly financial), Programmatic Digital Out-Of-Home (pDOOH) advertising uses automated, data-driven systems to serve ads on digital signage networks. This way advertisers can target specific audiences based on time, location, weather, and even customer behaviour, allowing you to display highly relevant ads. Brands can even specify key metrics that must be met (i.e. impressions or CPM) to display your ad.

What does all of this mean? A more dynamic, flexible, and efficient way of advertising to consumers that adjusts to data in real-time. Think ads for sunglasses on summer days and knitted hats in winter. Leading digital signage solutions such as Xibo offer built-in digital signage advertising integrations with leading pDOOH Supply Side Platforms to allow you to reach audiences of millions.

6. Green Signage

Sustainable digital signage solutions are more important than ever given the urgency of the climate crisis. As such, retailers are increasingly looking toward green signage to lower their carbon footprint. While digital signage is in itself considered more environmentally friendly than its print counterpart, many leaders in consumer electronics are looking to go a step further. Sony BRAVIA Professional Displays, for example, utilise SORPLAS (Sony’s own recycled plastic) for their rear cover, with a host of other features to minimise resource use and meet sustainability commitments. Expect to see even more of a focus on eco-initiatives in the upcoming year.

7. Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Last but not least, this article wouldn’t be complete without at least touching on AI’s potential for retail digital signage. The possibilities are truly exciting, whether analysing customer behaviour in real-time to deliver personalised and targeted content, or automating the timing and placement of ads based on deep customer insights. A cloud-based software solution can make all of this possible, integrating with third-party systems to collect and leverage AI-driven insights for smarter, more effective retail experiences.

Toward a New Retail Landscape

So, as we’ve seen, there’s lots on the horizon for 2025, with digital signage promising to offer more innovative and integrated experiences than ever before. These trends are set to reshape the way retailers engage with consumers, with the potential to not only offer personalised, seamless, and engaging experiences for them, but also create new revenue streams and provide insight into their behaviour. It’s clear then that digital signage is on track to become an even more powerful tool for driving growth and creating lasting connections with shoppers.

Looking to get started in retail digital signage? Start a free trial today.

Sources:
Sony, AV Procurement: The Sony Retail Audit, 2024.
EMARKETER, Retail Media Ad Spending Forecast H1, 2024
EMARKETER, Programmatic Digital Out-Of-Home (DOOH) Ad Spend Will Cross $1 Billion in 2025, 2023
McKinsey, Automation in retail: An executive overview for getting ready, 2019
PR Newswire, Global Smart Shelves Market worth USD 3.3 billion by 2025, 2023