WH Smith is charging brands “astronomical” amounts of money to advertise in its travel stores that they will never see a return on, according to retail experts.
After challenger brands spoke out about the high cost of ‘media packages’ pitched to them by WH Smith last week, a sales deck for 2025 shared with The Grocer shows the retailer is demanding as much as £125k for two weeks of advertising in a single store location.
The deck, titled ‘The Power of WHS Media 2025’, offers brands the opportunity to tap into the “fastest-growing retail media network in travel” with “a combined reach of 35m across national airports, rail and retail environments every fortnight”.
The fee for a fortnightly ‘store wrap’ ranges from £40k for Reading railway station, to £125k for Victoria railway station.
Meanwhile, fees for ‘window domination’ activations start at £10k per fortnight, rising to £25k for Liverpool Street station. Digital fascias range from £8.5k to £18.5k, while window posters cost £2.5k per fortnight. Store stickers are £500 and shelf barkers are £150 each.
Value for money questioned
Ged Futter, director of retail consultancy firm The Retail Mind, described the sums as “astronomical”, adding he could not “imagine that the numbers would ever stack up for any brand to get a return on this investment”.
He said: “How on earth could anybody think this looks like good value for money? Window domination for two weeks at Liverpool Street Station is £25,000. How are you going sell in the volume in one station? Yes that is the peak one, but if you go down the list… Heathrow [is] £12,000. I can’t imagine that the numbers would ever stack up for any brand to get a return on this investment.
“It is high footfall but if you go into Tesco, then you’re talking about significantly higher numbers, and you’d get in far more than one store. Any brand that is paying this has got a whole lot of money.”
Fmcg founder and the creator of the Future of Food Competition Barney Mauleverer agreed the sums meant startups were unlikely to see a return on their investment.
“There flat-out won’t be a sales uplift in WH Smith stores that pays for investments at this level,” he said. “If a brand is looking for awareness, reach and visibility then they may well see value in this due to the footfall in these station stores, but WH Smith need to be more transparent about media play vs sales uplifts.”
Retail consultant and Sentinel Management CEO David Sables labelled the figures on the rate card as “ludicrously high”.
“There’s very little data here supporting the believability on conversion,” he said. “It’s not unusual to see high rates like this but those rates are justified by an incredible amount of data.
“With Tesco, for example, an incredible amount of data will sit behind their rates and that is the justification. You might look at those figures and think they’re worse than these, but the difference is that that the cost per conversion is so much better.
“They’re better sold, better communicated and delivered against so it becomes a genuine advertising and promotional spend a supplier can hang their hat on.”
‘Lack of transparency’
Another former retail industry executive said that while retail media was “generally getting out of control”, it was rare for a rate card to reference “reach and cost rather than metrics like average ROAS [return on ad spend]”.
“I have never seen any useful data like average ROAS published by WH Smith, compared to Tesco for example, who are very transparent with returns,” they said.
The kind of sales uplift a smaller brand would need to see to justify the larger figures proposed by WH Smith would be “off the chart huge”, the executive warned.
“A good barometer is always: do they forecast or, ideally actually order sufficient additional volume to cover the advertising cost? If not then the brand needs to decide whether this is an awareness investment they want to make rather than a sales-boosting activity.
“There is a lack of transparency on expected returns in this deck and very premium costs for the reach, which would set some alarm bells ringing. I would need some difficult questions answering before I would spend any money on it.”
WH Smith defends ‘great value’ to brands
The rate card was “highly transparent” and showed “the wide range of opportunities for brands to partner with WH Smith, whatever their size or budget”, a spokesman for WH Smith insisted.
“We can only do this because of the strong, collaborative relationships we enjoy with suppliers, and the excellent results these campaigns deliver for them,” they said. “Because these campaigns deliver such great value to our brand partners, we find many of them come back again for further activations.”
However, even the smaller fees charged by WH Smith for window posters and floor stickers sounded “like a heck of a lot of lot of money” Futter noted.
“If you are a soft drinks brand making 10p [profit] per unit, that’s a heck of a lot of units you’ve got to sell in that one that one location to get a return on that window,” he said. “Yes, it is a distressed purchase and if you are in an airport there is probably less competition but if you’re in a railway station, there’s always competition.”
As well as coming under fire for the high cost of its media, WH Smith was also criticised by challenger brands last week for poor compliance and execution in relation to its media packages.
Brands described being asked to spend tens or even hundreds of thousands of pounds on the packages, only to find their products not appearing on shelf in the promised number of stores.
Others said they struggled to get buyers to book in the in-store, OOH and digital activities for which they had paid, while high rsps frequently resulted in poor rates of sale.
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