There was only one word I could reliably pronounce after a week in Poland: "Zabka"
Polish is a particularly unforgiving language for an outsider, and since most poeple I interacted with spoke perfect english, I didn't have much opportunity to try.
It helped that it was on nearly every corner. Żabka is a convenience chain — think 7-Eleven, but closer to a Japanese 7-Eleven, with pre-prepared and hot food actually worth eating. There are around 13,000 of them in a country of 37.5 million. Often one within sight of another.
I was only in Poland for a week and it was for a pretty briskly-paced family holiday, so I didn't do as much retail recon as I would have liked.
So this is what I noticed rather than deep market research, similar to my recent note about Australian retail media.
Let's jump in!
InPost Paczkomat
First observation: an astounding number of parcel lockers.
Poland has 73,200 parcel lockers. In a country of 37.5 million, that's one for every 512 people — roughly eight times the per-head density of the UK, and around ten times Germany's. Six rival networks built them, and two of those — Allegro and Orlen — are retailers rather than carriers.
Every machine is a permanent, street-level advertising surface.
Poland didn't set out to build Europe's densest out-of-home media network. It did it by accident, chasing parcels.
In this image you can see the company InPost with a locker bank that is wrapped in an ad for Maxi Zoo, driving footfall to a named address (ul. Żupnicza 10) with a QR code to their app and their loyalty brand.
InPost sells this as a real media business. Their own sales material claims wraps across more than 20,000 lockers, digital screens on the machines reaching up to 4 million viewers a month, and they name media houses plus FMCG, banking, telco and automotive its the buyer base.
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CTV ads
During some downtime back at the Airbnb, me and my parents watched some shows on YouTube. We were served ads for some P&G brands, Ambi-pur, Ariel etc. The retailer destinations were is Allegro - the Amazon of Poland, and Media Expert – an electronics and appliance chain.
The ad found an Australian with no Polish purchase history, in a rented flat, on someone else's TV. So there's nothing I can reliably infer here about the targeting.
But it did remind me just how many factors there are when comparing media trends between regions. Privacy laws are just one of the drivers here.
In the EU, using someone's data to target them on third-party media effectively requires their active agreement first — GDPR needs a lawful basis for the processing, and the ePrivacy rules require consent before anything is read from or written to someone's device. In the US there's no comprehensive federal privacy law; the state laws that exist mostly give people the right to opt out of having their data shared for cross-site ad targeting.
This is one reason of many that a given market might have a larger or smaller offsite retail media market.
Zabka
I mentioned Zabka in the opener. We were astounded by how many there were, often one within eyesight of another. I learned that this due to a few fascinating reasons:
- An aggressive franchise model: Almost every Żabka is run as a franchise with low startup costs, which lets the parent company expand rapidly using local owner-operators.
- Smart data-driven location planning: Zabka HQ uses advanced algorithms to pick new spots. Even with 13,000+ stores nationwide (in a country of 37.5M!) these stores are still remarkably busy.
- Sunday trading exemptions: When Poland introduced strict bans on Sunday shopping for major supermarkets, Żabka bypassed the restriction. Because the store is run by the individual franchisee who can legally work behind the counter themselves, they stay open on Sundays.
- High-demand services: They offer quick meals, hot food (like automated hot dog stations), parcel pickup, and extended hours
I was intrigued by the screens. Every store I went into had at least one screen. Typically I saw it promoting their convenience food and hot food items in the store, but I did spot a couple of genuine third-party paid placements: Dawtona (the oatmeal pouches) and SIP Next Gen Tea.
Żabka Ads launched on 21 January 2025, with over 1,500 digital screens across a network of more than 11,000 stores at the time.
I'm speculating here, but I'd imagine that most of the inventory isn't sold, at least right now. I visited a lot of Zabkas. Two outsider guesses, it's a very new media network, and/or Zabka is prioritizing selling their own products right now.
Rossmann
I saw many digital screens at the entryways for Rossmann, a drugstore and beauty chain.
My later research uncovered that Rossmann has 6,000 screens across 1,500 stores as of March 2022 — window-facing and internal, installed to pull people in and steer them round the store. They announced a retail media partnership with One Tech Group for programmatic in-store only in late January 2026.
That's four years between Rossmann installing 6,000 screens and announcing a programmatic in-store partnership. Perhaps they were mainly promoting their own house brand products (like ISANA, as seen here) during that time, or perhaps the ads were sold directly to brands, or as part of trade marketing.
This month I saw that mix: private label (ISANA), Rossmann exclusives ("TYLKO U NAS"), and third-party brands like Colgate.
Finally, a quick plug for Poland. I was just there for a week but I found it an incredibly hospitable, beautiful, clean and friendly place. I didn't really know what to expect but I was completely blown away. Definitely add Poland to your travel list.
I'd also like to thank all the people who reached out to suggest retail media experiences to check out. I ended up having less time to research than I wanted (I might have been, er, having fun with my family!) but hopefully that just means a second trip is in order.
