CPG companies spend around $400,000 for a 30-second commercial message on the hit TV series “Grey's Anatomy” to reach a largely female audience. But what if marketers could disseminate a message to a similar audience through a network of supermarkets, where their products are available and shoppers are primed for shopping?

Increasingly, CPG marketers are being offered that in-store opportunity through digital video screens. In 2007, the number of supermarkets with digital screens grew to 4,750 — roughly 25% of the stores in the top 50 chains — from 3,500 in 2006, according to Stephen Diorio, partner, Profitable Channels, a marketing services company in Westport, Conn. Half of the top 50 chains are either rolling out screens or have fully installed them, he said.

The screens, set up at checkout lanes, in high-traffic perimeter sections and in key Center Store aisles, feature a potpourri of recipe tips, meal preparation ideas, product information, lifestyle advice, celebrity interviews and commercials. Major screen providers include CBS Outernet (previously SignStorey), Premier Retail Networks (PRN), In-Store Broadcasting Network and NewSight Media Solutions.

While some major CPG companies have bought commercial time on in-store screens, what the in-store screens have lacked — in contrast to TV or radio broadcasts — is a neutral audience-measuring service that can provide advertisers with an objective read on the number of people being exposed to the marketing message.

The absence of that audience measurement metric has caused stores to get less attention as a marketing venue. “The store itself has never been truly considered and leveraged among the ranks of the top marketing and media tools, even though its potential reach and effectiveness equal if not surpass other traditional media vehicles,” said Steve Bratspies, senior vice president of marketing, Wal-Mart Stores, speaking in late September at the In-Store Marketing Expo in Chicago.

Working strenuously to fill that void is Nielsen In-Store, a new division of Nielsen Co., New York, which began collecting audience data from 160 stores operated by 17 retail chains on April 29. In addition to these retailers, Nielsen In-Store has partnered with 12 CPG companies and six ad agencies, as well as the In-Store Marketing Institute, in what is called the PRISM (Pioneering Research for an In-Store Metric) Consortium.

The aim of the PRISM Consortium, formed in the spring of 2006, is to create an in-store measurement standard that can be used by marketers in the same way they use Nielsen audience numbers for TV marketing and Arbitron numbers for radio marketing. The Consortium ran its first pilot last year at 10 stores without Nielsen's participation.

The in-store audience standard will apply to digital screens as well as to any other in-store marketing platform, including displays, endcaps and shelf talkers. Indeed, it could apply to the many new ways in which marketers are trying to make themselves known to shoppers in stores, such as shopping cart screens, brand ads on aisle signs and even ads that appear on freezer doors (see story, Page 36).

But digital screens could be one of the first beneficiaries of standard in-store audience measurements. “Our biggest battle is making people believe our [audience] data,” said Jeff Weidauer, vice president of marketing for CBS Outernet. “PRISM will help demonstrate that what we're saying is valid.”