The pitch with no price
The sales page makes a tidy case. The network's screens sit in more than 4,000 supermarkets. The average supermarket sees 20,000 or more visitors a week. Most people live within five miles of the store they call theirs. And statistics, the page says, show a person needs to see something about seven times before it sticks. The headline promise is "cost-effective, hyper-local targeted advertising."
What the page doesn't show is a price. There is no rate card, no starting figure, no range. Every store in the network's locator has its own quote button, which tells you the price is set one store at a time, for one buyer at a time.
Negotiated pricing isn't unusual in media. Radio stations, billboard companies and newspapers all negotiate. But "cost-effective" is a claim about price, and a claim about price with no price attached can't be checked by the person it's aimed at.
Who you're actually buying from
The brand on the website isn't the whole story. In early 2023, this regional sales brand was acquired by a larger national in-store network. Its signature product, a sanitizer-wipe stand topped with a 32-inch screen, was folded into the larger network's store-entrance lineup.
The acquired brand's site is still live and still taking quote requests. Its sanitizer-stand copy still says grocery stores and sanitizer stands are busier than ever, a line that made more sense in 2021 than it does today.
The fine print: The person who answers your quote request may be working from the parent network's pricing, contracts and measurement, not the regional company the website presents. Ask whose name is on the contract, who reports your results, and who you call when a screen goes dark.
Their numbers don't agree with each other
A seller's figures should at least match across its own pages. These don't.
| The claim | What else the site says | The question it raises |
|---|---|---|
| Over 4,000 locations (homepage) | The store locator reports 5,083 locations | Which is current, and how many have working screens? |
| Shoppers make 6.4 grocery trips a month (one product page) | Shoppers make 10+ trips a month (the 32-inch product page) | Which is right, and where does either come from? |
| 20,000 people visit the average supermarket weekly | No source given | A visitor is not a viewer. How many see the screen? |
| 98% of grocery shoppers influence household purchases like finance, insurance and auto | No source given | Influence how, measured by whom? |
| It takes about 7 exposures to remember something | "Statistics show," with no statistic cited | See "Who paid for the research," below |
The Food Industry Association (FMI) offers an independent check. Its 2026 shopper survey found Americans make about 1.6 individual grocery trips a week. Over four weeks, that works out to roughly 6.4 trips, which matches the lower figure. So the 6.4 is plausibly a count of trips to all grocery stores combined, not visits to any one store. That's my reading of the arithmetic; the network doesn't say.
The same FMI survey found Americans visit 5.4 different grocery banners in a month. A shopper who makes six grocery runs during your four-week flight may make only two or three of them to the store carrying your ad. If seven exposures really were the threshold, a single-store buy would reach it only with the store's most loyal regulars.
Store size varies too. The locator lists everything from rural independents with a single screen to supermarkets with seven. The network-wide averages on the sales page tell you nothing about the store you're buying.
What it probably costs
With no published rate, the best evidence is indirect.
| Source | Figure |
|---|---|
| National out-of-home broker, published rate card: digital hand-sanitizer screens | $300–$500 per store, per 4 weeks |
| Same broker: storefront digital screens | $750–$1,500 per store, per 4 weeks |
| Same broker: minimum buy | $5,000+ per market |
| The network's own terms for retailers who resell screen time | No less than $12 per 1,000 impressions |
A reasonable planning estimate for a local advertiser is a few hundred dollars per store per four weeks. Multi-store packages, longer commitments and a minimum spend are likely. Treat that as an estimate, not a quote.
The number that matters more than the price is the impression count, because that is what turns an invoice into a cost.
A worked example, with hypothetical numbers. Say you're quoted $400 per store for four weeks. The seller counts every visitor as an impression: 20,000 a week, times four weeks, is 80,000. That's a $5 cost per thousand, which sounds like a bargain.
But a visitor becomes an impression only if they pass the screen while your spot is playing, and becomes a viewer only if they look up. If the defensible count is a quarter of that, 20,000, the same $400 is a $20 cost per thousand.
Same invoice. Four times the price.
Ask how an impression is counted, and whether it is measured by a sensor or camera or estimated from store traffic. An estimate built from foot traffic is a guess with a decimal point.
Who paid for the research
The most-quoted statistic in the category comes from a survey the network published itself in 2026. Among 1,018 grocery shoppers surveyed that March, 62% said they had bought a product directly after seeing it advertised on an in-store screen.
Read the method, not the headline. The figure is self-reported and open-ended: it counts anyone who has ever done this, at any store, after any screen, at any point in their life. It measures no particular campaign. The survey's zone rankings came from showing people before-and-after photos of a store area, with and without a screen, and asking how the screen would change their trip. Those are reactions to a picture, not to a shopping trip. And the "favorability score" used to rank those zones adds neutral answers to positive ones. A shopper who doesn't care either way counts as favorable.
The fine print: A seller's survey of how people feel about the seller's product is marketing. It can be honest marketing, but it isn't evidence that your campaign will work.
Stronger research exists, but look at who ordered it. The best-known recent report on in-store advertising drew on Kantar's cross-media measurement and was commissioned by a U.K. company that operates in-store media networks. Its findings are real. Across more than 100 consumer-goods campaigns, adding retail media raised overall reach from 65% to 72% of the target audience. Digital end-of-aisle displays lifted brand sales 9.1%, against 5.1% for static ones. Kantar's own 2025 study showing out-of-home advertising outperforming digital was a five-year collaboration with a billboard company.
None of that makes the findings wrong. Kantar's methods are serious. But almost every one of these studies measures national brands selling products on that store's shelves: the cereal ad twenty feet from the cereal. A heating contractor, a dentist or a car dealer at the checkout isn't selling anything in that store. For them the screen is a small indoor billboard, and shelf-lift research doesn't transfer.
The network's featured testimonial comes from a home-heating company whose customers mention the ad when they call. That's encouraging. It is also an anecdote, not a measurement.
The rule of seven
No one has produced the study. The common origin story credits Hollywood studios in the 1930s, who supposedly found moviegoers needed to see a film promoted seven times. Other tellings move it to the 1920s. Another traces the idea to Claude Hopkins's 1923 book Scientific Advertising, which put the figure at 20. A rule with three origin stories and no data is folklore. Frequency matters in advertising. The specific number is a sales line.
What proof actually looks like
Research firms that sell measurement rather than media agree on a few basics. None of them would accept "62% say they've bought something after seeing a screen" as proof that a specific campaign worked.
Compare against people who didn't see it. Dynata, which runs one of the largest consumer research panels, builds its brand-lift studies on a simple design: measure people who saw the ad against a matched group who didn't. It starts with recall, on the reasoning that if people don't remember seeing the ad, nothing further down the line can be credited to it.
Subtract what would have happened anyway. Lifesight, a marketing-measurement company, makes its case on a single point: results reported by the platform that sold the ad often take credit for sales that would have happened without it. Its answer is geographic holdout testing. You run the ad in some areas, keep it out of comparable ones, and compare.
Know where you started. Hanover Research treats a brand-awareness baseline as the essential starting point for judging whether a campaign moved anything. Its methods include store-intercept surveys, which means asking real shoppers, in the store, what they've noticed.
The premise holds. YouGov's consumer tracking supports the part of the pitch that is true: groceries remain a category people still prefer to buy in person. The store isn't going anywhere. The open question is whether a screen inside it moves your business.
The lane is changing under the screen
Checkout screens were built for a captive audience: people standing in line with nothing to do. That audience has changed in two ways.
First, the screen now competes with the phone. FMI found that 71% of grocery shoppers use digital technology while they shop. Second, self-checkout has spread. Estimates of its share of grocery transactions vary widely, and one compilation put the range for 2022 at 29% to 55%. That spread is itself a warning about how loosely this industry counts.
Ask which lanes carry screens, whether self-checkout shoppers ever pass one, and whether the impression estimate has been adjusted for either change.
Before you sign
These questions cost nothing to ask, and a seller who can't answer them has told you something.
- How many screens are in each store I'm buying, and exactly where are they?
- How long is the loop, how many advertisers share it, and how many times an hour does my spot run?
- How is an impression counted: measured by sensor or camera, or estimated from store traffic?
- Will I get proof-of-play reports showing when my spot actually ran?
- Can a direct competitor run in the same loop?
- How long is the term, does it renew automatically, and what does it take to cancel?
- Who produces the creative, what does it cost, and can I change it mid-flight?
- Whose contract is it: the brand on the website, or the network behind it?
Run your own holdout test
You don't need a research firm to borrow its logic.
- Pick two similar stores in similar towns. For four weeks before you buy anything, track the calls, visits or sales you get from each area.
- Buy one store. Leave the matched store dark.
- Put a unique offer, code or phone number on the screen ad and nowhere else.
- Run the full flight, then compare the two areas against their own baselines and count responses to the unique offer.
- If the area around the advertised store didn't outperform the dark one, the screen didn't earn its invoice.
A statistician would want more stores and more weeks. But this is the same logic the measurement firms sell at scale, and it's far better evidence than a survey.
The bottom line
The grocery store is still one of the few places nearly everyone goes, and a screen there can work. But this pitch runs on figures without sources, a rule without an origin, and research paid for by the people selling the screens.
The burden of proof belongs to the seller. Ask for a control group, not a survey.