In-store retail media has spent years playing catch-up with the planning logic of television and digital advertising, and a partnership announced on July 29, 2026, between Grocery TV and Esri attempts to close that gap by importing more than 3,500 behavioral and psychographic audience attributes into the in-store planning process.

A shift from geography to behavior

For most of its short history, in-store media has been bought the way outdoor advertising has always been bought: by location. A brand picks a metro area, a retail footprint, perhaps a store cluster near a competitor, and buys screens inside it. What the brand rarely knows, until now, is who specifically walks past those screens and what those shoppers are likely to do next. According to Grocery TV, the partnership with Esri changes that equation by layering the retailer's Market Potential dataset onto Grocery TV's national, retailer-owned network of more than 6,700 stores.

The number at the center of the announcement is 3,500. That figure represents the count of behavioral and psychographic attributes now available to advertisers planning campaigns on the platform, spanning categories that include automotive, finance, health and wellness, telecom, and consumer packaged goods. Rather than selecting stores based purely on ZIP code or retail banner, brands and agencies can now build custom store lists around shoppers who, according to Grocery TV, over-index on specific behaviors: planning to purchase a vehicle, prioritizing organic food, or having recently switched wireless carriers.

That distinction matters because it addresses a structural mismatch that has existed since in-store media networks began scaling in earnest. Television and digital campaigns have long been planned around defined behavioral segments - a household in-market for a minivan, a consumer who recently searched for refinancing options, a shopper who buys organic groceries weekly. In-store media, by contrast, has historically relied on broad demographic or geographic proxies because store-level data rarely extended beyond footfall counts and retailer loyalty numbers. Grocery TV's pitch is that its network can now be planned against the same segment logic that a media buyer would use when setting up a connected television or programmatic display campaign.

What the CEO said, and what it signals

Marlow Nickell, co-founder and chief executive officer of Grocery TV, framed the update in terms of how the channel is now perceived internally at brands and agencies rather than how it has traditionally been categorized. "In-store media is increasingly being viewed as an extension of video and digital strategies, not just an out-of-home buy," Nickell said. "The partnership with Esri enhances our ability to let media buyers approach in-store by audience, not just by placement. Most purchases still happen in physical stores, and reaching the right shopper at the point of decision is one of the most valuable moments in the funnel."

That framing - in-store as an extension of video and digital rather than a distinct out-of-home category - is not a small rhetorical choice. It places Grocery TV's product roadmap alongside the broader push across the retail media sector to standardize measurement and planning conventions so that in-store inventory can compete for the same budget lines as television and digital, rather than being treated as a bolt-on placement decided after the primary media plan is finished.

Chris Nickola, director of commercial at Esri, described the arrangement from the data provider's side, emphasizing continuity with Esri's existing work in consumer behavior analysis at the local level. "Esri has long helped organizations understand consumer behavior at the local level," Nickola said. "Partnering with Grocery TV brings that intelligence directly into the in-store media planning process, connecting behavioral and psychographic insights to the physical environments where most shoppers visit every week. It's a natural extension of how location intelligence can inform smarter, more relevant advertising."

The scale of the underlying network

Grocery TV's reach is a significant part of why this integration matters beyond a single vendor announcement. According to the company, its platform now spans more than 120 retail partners and reaches 95 million unique shoppers, activating behavioral targeting across independent and regional grocers nationwide. That places the network among the larger infrastructure providers operating in the current wave of physical-store media expansion, a trend PPC Land has tracked closely throughout 2026.

The 6,700-store figure cited in the Esri announcement also represents continued growth for Grocery TV. The company's May 2026 partnership with The Raley's Companies added 208 stores across California, Nevada, and Arizona and brought the network to more than 6,700 stores at the time, up from over 6,500 stores cited in the company's earlier background materials. That earlier expansion already spanned partnerships with regional chains including Hy-Vee, Giant Eagle, Northeast Grocery, and ShopRite, according to Grocery TV, giving the network a footprint that stretches across the Midwest, Northeast, and now the American West. The consistency of the 6,700-store figure between the Raley's rollout in May and the Esri partnership in July suggests the network's store count has held steady over the intervening ten weeks, even as its data and measurement capabilities have continued to expand.

Context: a channel racing to prove it can be measured and planned like digital

The Esri integration does not exist in isolation. It follows a pattern of announcements throughout 2026 in which Grocery TV has added infrastructure typically associated with more mature advertising channels. In April 2026, the company partnered with ABCS Insights to bring independent, third-party sales lift measurement to its network, drawing on a panel covering 41 million households across the United States that combines receipt data and card transaction data. That partnership gave brands a way to connect ad exposure inside a store to verified purchases at the product level, whether those purchases happened at the store where the ad ran or at a different retailer entirely.

Two months later, in June 2026, Grocery TV published its 2026 In-Store Shopper Perception Report, co-published with Andrew Lipsman, founder and independent analyst at Media, Ads + Commerce. That study, based on a survey of 1,018 U.S. grocery shoppers conducted in March 2026, found that 62 percent of respondents reported purchasing a product directly after seeing it advertised on an in-store screen - a notable rise in receptivity compared with the original version of the same research conducted in 2023.

Taken together, the sequence of announcements - sales lift measurement in April, shopper perception research in June, and now audience-based planning infrastructure in July - describes a company building out the full stack of capabilities that brand advertisers expect before committing meaningful budget: proof that the channel works, evidence of how shoppers respond, and now a planning framework that lets media buyers select inventory using the same behavioral logic they already apply elsewhere.

That pattern is not unique to Grocery TV. Competing platforms have pursued similar capabilities from different angles. In-Store Marketplace, backed by parent company Mood Media, launched a partnership with Stater Bros. Markets in May 2026 to bring programmatic audio to 165 Southern California grocery locations, with digital screens planned as a subsequent phase. Separately, ISM released a research report in April 2026, produced in partnership with Catalyst Media Consulting, arguing that the biggest obstacle to scaling in-store advertising is not measurement capability itself but a fundamental misalignment between the scorecards that brands, agencies, merchants, and retail media networks each use to define success.

Beyond grocery specifically, the push toward centralized, audience-capable in-store infrastructure has extended into electronics retail. Broadsign announced in April 2026 that JB Hi-Fi, Australia's largest consumer electronics retailer, was deploying the Broadsign Platform across more than 200 stores, integrating with Criteo and Retail Media Works as demand partners. And Perion won a deal to power Best Buy Canada's 308-store retail media network using technology built partly through its 2023 acquisition of Hivestack, a programmatic digital out-of-home company.

The audience taxonomy question

What sets the Esri integration apart from pure measurement or third-party sales lift deals is that it addresses planning rather than reporting. Measurement tells a brand what happened after a campaign ran. Audience-based planning changes what a brand can select before the campaign begins. This is the same category of capability that has driven audience infrastructure investment across other parts of the advertising ecosystem throughout 2025 and 2026.

Google made its AI-powered Audience Persona feature available to all Display & Video 360 customers in September 2025, letting advertisers describe an audience's characteristics, interests, and lifestyle in natural language and receive AI-generated targeting suggestions rather than manually selecting from platform-specific taxonomies. Similarly, DV360 expanded its audience reporting into ten distinct categories in late 2025, separating demographics, affinity, and in-market classifications so that advertisers could apply more granular behavioral logic to campaign targeting.

Retail media networks operating in adjacent commerce channels have pursued comparable audience expansion. Nielsen Marketing Cloud brought demographic and psychographic segments to Amazon DSP in December 2025 through a Zeotap integration, targeting industries including consumer packaged goods, automotive, and finance - the same category spread named in the Grocery TV and Esri announcement. And gaming platform Unity built an Audience Hub in 2026 specifically to translate its behavioral data on 256 million monthly active users into the demographic, psychographic, and behavioral segment language that brand teams already use for cross-channel planning.

The recurrence of this pattern across gaming, connected television data providers, e-commerce, and now in-store grocery media suggests a broader industry convergence: platforms holding rich behavioral or transactional data are increasingly under pressure to translate that data into a standardized audience taxonomy, because brand media planning teams operate around that taxonomy regardless of channel.

What remains unaddressed

The announcement does not specify pricing for audience-based targeting relative to Grocery TV's standard geographic or demographic buys, nor does it disclose whether the Esri attribute set will be updated on a fixed schedule or continuously refreshed. It also does not describe how Grocery TV verifies that Esri's modeled attributes - derived from the Market Potential dataset rather than from deterministic, retailer-specific purchase records - correlate with actual in-store purchase behavior at the individual store level. That question echoes a broader measurement debate within the retail media sector. A June 2026 analysis of retail media's attribution gaps found that closed-loop measurement systems, while reliable for tracking sales at a specific retailer, struggle to capture incremental lift that crosses from one retailer's ecosystem into another, or that happens with a delay measured in days or weeks rather than at the moment of exposure. Esri's psychographic and behavioral attributes, by design, model likely shopper characteristics across broad population segments rather than tracking individual verified transactions, which places this announcement in the planning and targeting category rather than the closed-loop measurement category that Grocery TV's earlier ABCS Insights partnership addressed.

According to Grocery TV, audience-based targeting powered by Esri is available immediately to brands and agencies planning campaigns across the platform.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Grocery TV, a New York City-based in-store retail media platform led by co-founder and CEO Marlow Nickell, and Esri, a location intelligence and geographic information systems company represented in the announcement by Chris Nickola, director of commercial.

What: A partnership bringing more than 3,500 behavioral and psychographic audience attributes from Esri's Market Potential dataset into Grocery TV's in-store media planning process, allowing advertisers to build custom store lists based on shopper behaviors rather than geography or retailer footprint alone.

When: Announced July 29, 2026.

Where: Applied across Grocery TV's national, retailer-owned network of more than 6,700 grocery stores in the United States, spanning more than 120 retail partners.

Why: In-store media has historically been planned around broad demographic or geographic proxies, unlike television and digital campaigns that are built around defined behavioral segments. The Esri partnership lets brands and agencies apply the same audience-based planning logic to physical store advertising that they already use elsewhere, arriving as the in-store media sector continues building measurement and targeting infrastructure to compete for budget alongside more established advertising channels.