Meet the Company that Turns Shopping Carts into Ad Inventory

Advertising can get pretty niche. For instance, here’s an entire agency dedicated to helping supermarkets transition from print to digital marketing.

Supermarkets, it seems, have their own advertising ecosystem. Ad space at the checkout stand. On grocery dividers, those rectangular bars that separate my very normal grocery shopping from your...also very normal grocery shopping. On the back of receipts. Oh. And on shopping carts.

In the grocery universe, there’s a company, IndoorMedia, that helps small businesses advertise throughout their local grocery store. One of its divisions, Cartvertising, focuses on shopping cart ads.

Rebeka Kasle, a sales rep for Cartvertising, talked to Marketing Brew about the virtues of advertising on the mighty shopping cart, as well as why she thinks (aside from it being her job) it’s a worthy investment for a local business owner.

Ads in the aisle

Cartvertising has contracts with chains like Kroger, which utilize their carts as out-of-home ad space. For Kasle, who lives and works in Tucson, AZ, her job involves identifying local businesses that might be interested in running an ad campaign in their nearest grocery store(s).

Kasle said insurance agents, loan officers, and realtors are some of Cartvertising’s most popular customers, as they want locals to know who they are and what they offer.

• When it comes to ad space on the cart, there are options: the baby seat, behind it, or on the “nose” (aka front) of the cart. Or all three.
• Companies can also choose how many carts they’d like to place ads on per store. According to Kasle, a store typically carries anywhere between 100 and 500 carts. Her clients must buy at least 25% of the fleet.
• “Less than [25%] doesn't give you the ROI, because there's not enough exposure,” she explained.

As far as pricing goes, Kasle said a campaign that runs on 50% of a store’s carts for one year can cost around $5,000. And Cartvertising handles the creative elements as part of the deal.

“The best way to describe how to design a Cartvertising ad is to think of it as a billboard. You want it clean and simple with minimal information,” she said.

But does it work?

Let’s face it: The idea of advertising on a grocery cart sounds quaint in 2021, especially as digital media continues its rise.

Biased as she may be, Kasle argues that it’s effective. She points to the fact that people make regular trips to the grocery store, sometimes more than once a week. In other words, the repeated exposure gets in shoppers’ heads.

• “When you see that realtor’s face every time you go to the grocery store, you start to feel like you know her,” Kasle said. “When it comes time that you actually need a realtor and you start looking, [you think], ‘Oh, I know her.’”
• Even so, Kasle admits that it takes time for these campaigns to work; she said many clients report noticing zero changes after a year’s worth of ads. The key is renewing campaigns year after year to “build the momentum” over time and become a fixture in the neighborhood.
• That’s not to say they can’t work quickly. Kasle said one of her clients “was not getting any patients because no one knew they had a clinic in the area.” Nine days into a Cartvertising campaign, she claims the clinic added seven new patients.

Looking ahead: Kasle said she’s not worried about the growth of online grocery shopping as a threat to Cartvertising’s business. A recent eMarketer study found that online grocery sales in the US made up just 7.4% of all grocery purchases in 2020 (a year when many people just didn’t leave their homes).

“There’ll always be people who want to do online shopping—it's so easy. But there's always going to be enough people that will go to the grocery store,” she said. — MS