With smart cart advertising, Instacart is enabling in-store digital marketing for grocery brands that are looking for more targeted and customized ways to engage with their customers.

Grocery brands are seeking more individualized and focused methods to connect with consumers; hence, Instacart is facilitating in-store digital marketing with smart cart advertising.

The grocery aggregator revealed on Monday, January 8, that Bristol Farms stores in Southern California will be the first to get real-time targeted messaging through a pilot program of ads on to the displays of its Caper Cart smart shopping carts. Additional grocers will follow. According to the corporation, this opens up new advertising opportunities, such as suggesting Dreyer's Grand Ice Cream — one of the first sponsors of this test program — to customers who add ice cream cones to their carts.

By the year's end, "thousands" of Instacart smart carts should be in use, the company announced in a press statement.

There are other supermarket technology companies aiming for similar in-store advertising prospects as the aggregator. Guy Mordoch, CEO of A2Z Smart Technologies Corp.'s main smart cart product, Cust2Mate, stated in a June interview with PYMNTS that in the future, the cart will be able to run retail media and advertisements on it based on data, as well as provide insights driven by data.

Nick Minnick, vice president of strategic partnerships at Chicory, highlighted the growing demand for targeted advertising due to evolving consumer data regulations, which require alternatives that don't rely on such information.