In-Store Marketplace (ISM) on May 5, 2026, announced a partnership with Stater Bros. Markets to launch an in-store retail media network across 165 grocery locations in Southern California, starting with programmatic audio and expanding to digital screens later in the year. The deal brings together ISM's centralized ad tech platform and Mood Media's existing hardware footprint to give national and regional brands a single point of entry into the Stater Bros. store estate.

The retailer and its footprint

Stater Bros. Markets is the largest privately owned grocery chain in Southern California, according to ISM's announcement. The company was founded on August 17, 1936, in Yucaipa, California, when twin brothers Cleo and Leo Stater purchased a small grocery store from W.A. Davis with a $600 down payment. Nearly nine decades later, the company operates 167 supermarkets across seven counties in Southern California and employs approximately 18,000 people, with annual sales exceeding $4 billion, according to the company's own history pages.

Headquartered in San Bernardino, Stater Bros. draws more than 2.5 million weekly store visits, according to the announcement. That scale gives advertisers consistent, repeatable access to a geographically concentrated shopper base. Nearly half of Stater Bros. shoppers identify as Hispanic or Latino, according to ISM, with higher-than-average household income and what the company characterizes as an openness to product discovery. The chain entered the Fortune 500 for the first time in 2006, ranked at number 493, the first Inland Empire-based company to do so.

Pete Van Helden currently serves as president and CEO of Stater Bros., having been appointed to the role by the late executive chairman Jack H. Brown before Brown's death in November 2016. Brown had joined Stater Bros. in 1981 and led the company's growth into the largest privately owned supermarket chain in Southern California.

What ISM brings technically

ISM describes itself as the retail industry's first centralized platform for standardizing and unifying digital in-store media. Its parent company, Mood Media, already had a hardware footprint inside Stater Bros. stores - the audio infrastructure was in place before the partnership. What ISM adds is the programmatic layer: centralized inventory management, campaign activation workflows, targeting capabilities, and access from demand-side platforms (DSPs).

The technical structure of the deal is straightforward. Brands or agencies connect to ISM's platform once and can then access Stater Bros.' in-store inventory without requiring separate integrations per retailer. Inventory for the audio network will be sold through Vibenomics, ISM's audio monetization partner, enabling brands to activate campaigns at scale.

Vibenomics, which is itself a Mood Media company, has a history in programmatic audio out-of-home (AOOH). The company raised $12.3 million in Series B funding in 2022, with stated plans to expand to more than 20,000 locations by the end of 2023, according to PPC Land's coverage of the raise. Vibenomics has also built integrations with multiple ad tech providers, including Triton Digital for dynamic ad insertion and programmatic marketplace access, and Vistar Media for ad serving and scheduling. Its marketplace, according to earlier coverage, reached an audience of nearly 150 million unique consumers across approximately 4,000 individual locations.

The significance of routing Stater Bros. audio inventory through Vibenomics is that it slots this regional grocer into a wider programmatic ecosystem. Buyers already purchasing audio inventory through Vibenomics' existing network can reach Stater Bros. shoppers without building new direct relationships with the retailer.

Phased rollout: audio first, screens later

The partnership follows a sequenced deployment model. Phase one concentrates on in-store audio, delivering what ISM describes as timely, contextually relevant messaging at the moment of purchase. Future phases will add digital screens to create what ISM calls a unified in-store media ecosystem - one that gives brands access to multiple touchpoints through a single integration point.

The decision to sequence audio ahead of screens reflects the realities of hardware deployment at scale. Mood Media's audio infrastructure was already present in Stater Bros. stores, which means the first phase requires no new hardware installation at the store level. Digital screens represent a more capital-intensive addition and carry greater complexity in terms of content management, placement, and measurement. By staging the rollout, the partnership can establish advertiser demand and operational workflows on the audio side before taking on the broader infrastructure challenge of a full screen network.

Early success metrics for the partnership will include advertiser demand, shopper receptivity, and the ability to deliver value without disrupting the shopping experience, according to the announcement.

The regional grocery argument

The Stater Bros. deal extends ISM's strategy of building retail media infrastructure for regional grocery chains - a segment that national retailers and large platform operators have not historically prioritized. According to Paul Brenner, SVP of Global Retail Media and Partnerships for ISM, "Regional grocers like Stater Bros. represent one of the most compelling opportunities in retail media today. Their focused footprint and trusted customer relationships enable brands to connect with shoppers in ways that feel relevant and impactful. By bringing together ISM's retail media platform and Mood Media's in-store technology, we're building a scalable solution designed to support Stater Bros.' long-term growth."

The argument for regional grocery as a distinct advertising channel rests on shopper trust data. According to ISM, nearly 80% of shoppers say they trust their neighborhood brick-and-mortar grocery store more than national giants like Amazon or Walmart to offer fair, personalized deals. That trust gap is commercially significant: an advertiser reaching a Stater Bros. shopper inside the store is reaching someone who has demonstrated a preference for that specific retail environment.

From Stater Bros.' perspective, the partnership enables the company to introduce advertising into its stores in a way that, in the company's framing, complements rather than disrupts the shopping experience. According to Denise Singler, VP of Integrated Marketing at Stater Bros. Markets, "Stater Bros. Markets has always been focused on service to our customers and our community. This partnership enables us to thoughtfully introduce in-store media in a way that complements the shopping experience while supporting our community and our vendor partners in a way that stays true to our 90-year history as Southern California's local grocer."

The broader market context

Retail media has grown into one of the largest and fastest-moving segments within digital advertising. According to ISM's announcement, US advertisers are projected to spend $71.09 billion on retail media in 2026. That figure reflects a channel that has expanded well beyond its origins in sponsored product listings on e-commerce platforms to now encompass in-store audio, digital screens, connected television, off-site programmatic display, and more.

The IAB and IAB Europe released the first industry-wide in-store retail media measurement standards for public comment in September 2024, establishing unified frameworks for definitions, ad formats, store zone classification, and measurement guidelines. The move acknowledged that in-store was the least standardized segment of the retail media ecosystem - which the ISM-Stater Bros. partnership directly operates within.

That standardization effort is still working through implementation. ISM itself published a research report on April 7, 2026, in partnership with Catalyst Media Consulting, arguing that the primary obstacle to scaling digital in-store advertising is not a measurement technology gap but a misalignment between how different stakeholders define success. As PPC Land reported on the ISM report, brands, agencies, merchants, and retail media networks each apply different scorecards to the same campaign - creating gridlock even when the technical measurement capability exists. ISM's proposed framework, the Shopper Purchase Rate, measures product movement by shopper segment using matched-market tests rather than requiring one-to-one digital attribution.

The Stater Bros. partnership arrives within weeks of that report, suggesting ISM is simultaneously building its intellectual framework for in-store measurement and expanding its network of retail partners. The two activities are connected: the more retailers ISM connects to its platform, the more data it can reference when arguing for its measurement methodology.

Separately, Grocery TV announced in late April 2026 a partnership with ABCS Insights that brought independent, third-party sales lift measurement to its own in-store network - a move that underscores how measurement credibility has become a competitive differentiator among in-store retail media platforms. Grocery TV's network spans more than 6,500 locations.

Audio as the entry point

Starting with audio carries specific logic in the grocery context. Audio messaging reaches shoppers throughout the store, not just in front of specific screens or shelves. It does not require a customer to look up from a product or cart. The moment of delivery - while a shopper is actively moving through the store - sits close to the point of purchase, which is the core claim of in-store advertising's value proposition.

Research published by Vibenomics in July 2025 and covered by PPC Land found significant generational variation in how shoppers respond to in-store audio. According to the study, which surveyed 973 consumers aged 18 to 79, in-store audio significantly impacts Gen Z's buying behavior over five times more than Baby Boomers. Among Gen Z shoppers specifically, 50% reported purchasing products in-store as a direct result of hearing audio advertisements.

The broader audio advertising market has been in a period of sustained growth, though underinvestment relative to consumer attention remains a documented gap. According to a 2025 report from AdsWizz, audio accounts for 31% of consumers' total media time but receives only 9% of advertising budgets, as PPC Land reported. In-store audio occupies a specific niche within that broader category: unlike streaming or podcast audio, it is delivered in a physical location at a moment when purchase intent is structurally high.

Programmatic audio shifts were also examined in a December 2025 analysis covered by PPC Land, which noted that audio advertising was moving toward omnichannel, identity-powered platforms in 2026. That trajectory aligns with the kind of integration ISM is pursuing - connecting in-store audio inventory to the same programmatic pipelines that brands use to buy other media types.

Marketing implications

For the marketing community, the Stater Bros.-ISM deal illustrates several structural shifts in how in-store advertising is being built out. First, it demonstrates that regional grocers can access sophisticated programmatic infrastructure without building their own technology. ISM functions as an infrastructure layer that sits between the retailer's store estate and the broader programmatic market.

Second, it highlights how Mood Media's existing hardware relationships create an accelerant for programmatic deployment. Rather than beginning with hardware installation, ISM can layer software and monetization capabilities onto equipment that is already in stores. That reduces the capital and time investment required to bring a new retailer's inventory to market.

Third, the deal reflects the continued importance of first-party data and shopper identity in retail media strategy. Stater Bros.' 2.5 million weekly visitors represent a specific, geographically concentrated audience with documented demographic characteristics. That specificity is what gives regional grocery networks their differentiated value proposition in a media landscape increasingly organized around first-party data.

The IAB Europe's updated retail media guide from July 2025 noted that retail media had moved from a trade-driven add-on to a strategic growth engine, with monetization now spanning on-site, off-site, and in-store environments. The Stater Bros. partnership is one practical expression of that expansion - a 90-year-old regional grocery chain becoming an addressable media property for programmatic buyers.

Timeline

Summary

Who: In-Store Marketplace (ISM), backed by Mood Media, in partnership with Stater Bros. Markets. Inventory will be monetized through Vibenomics. Key named executives include Paul Brenner, SVP of Global Retail Media and Partnerships at ISM, and Denise Singler, VP of Integrated Marketing at Stater Bros. Markets.

What: The launch of an in-store retail media network starting with programmatic audio across 165 Stater Bros. grocery locations, with digital screens planned as a subsequent phase later in 2026. ISM's platform provides centralized inventory management, campaign activation, targeting, and programmatic buying capabilities for brands seeking to reach Stater Bros. shoppers.

When: The partnership was announced on May 5, 2026. Audio deployment is in the first phase; digital screen expansion is planned for later in 2026.

Where: Stater Bros. Markets stores across Southern California, primarily concentrated in San Bernardino and Riverside counties, with additional locations in Orange County, Los Angeles County, and parts of San Diego, Ventura, and Kern counties. The chain operates approximately 167 stores in total.

Why: Retail media spending in the US is projected to reach $71.09 billion in 2026. ISM is expanding its platform into regional grocery, arguing that chains like Stater Bros. offer differentiated advertiser value through high shopper trust, geographic concentration, and specific demographic profiles - characteristics that large national retailers cannot replicate at the local level. For Stater Bros., the partnership creates a new revenue stream while giving vendor partners a formal advertising channel within the store environment.

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