Cart Before The Horse

In the advertising world, cracking the shopping cart mystery was just about as elusive as solving the riddle of the Sphinx.
It was something which has plagued marketers for generations.

How to use the shopping cart as ad medium??



As far as marketing goes, consumers are at their most vulnerable while pushing their cart around the supermarket. Surrounded by aisle upon aisle of products, they use the cart as a crutch to help them safely navigate their way through to the checkout and doing so having incurred as little damage as possible.

But if the shopping cart was on the side of the advertisers, then the potential windfall is untold.

This article from Advertising Age mentions how the mystery may just have been solved.

MediaCart, a Texas-based company, have made great strides in this area and just began testing these carts in a three-store pilot in the Northeast. They plan more tests in the summer and if all goes well they will rollout nationally by the end of the year.

This small clip courtesy of the MediaCart website offers an insight into how the carts will appear and operate.




Our children will look at carts which don't possess digital screens and wonder the same way we wondered about black and white tv's, rotary-dial telephones and gramophones.