A Founder Who Started as the Developer
Marlow Nickell runs Grocery TV, which is a business that puts screens in grocery stores and then sells advertising on those screens. There are now more than 21,000 of those screens across roughly 6,500 stores in the United States, which the company says reaches about 95 million shoppers a month, or something like one in four Americans standing in a grocery aisle at any given moment. This is a very physical thing for a piece of ad technology to be. Most retail media is code moving between servers. Grocery TV is a piece of hardware bolted somewhere between the frozen aisle and checkout, with a small computer inside, quietly counting.
Nickell is the co-founder and chief executive. He is also, in the origin story of the company, the person who wrote the initial software. This is worth pausing on. Most founders begin in the C-suite and hire engineers. Nickell arrived the other way around. Don Oelke had a prototype and needed someone to make it work. Nickell and his partner, Edward Cates, were running a boutique software engineering firm called Cube in Austin. They took the job. The job turned into a company. The company turned into a network. Nickell, somewhere along the way, became CEO.
The background that produced this outcome is unusual in ad tech. Nickell studied physics at the University of Texas at Austin, and he did it inside Plan II Honors, an interdisciplinary liberal arts program that leans hard on the humanities. He picked up freelance software work in college for spending money. After graduation he went to McKinsey & Company as a Business Analyst, which is the standard graduate-school-for-people-who-don't-go-to-graduate-school move for high-achieving undergrads. Then he left, co-founded Cube, and, after a prototype landed on his desk, ended up spending nearly a decade turning a screen in a supermarket into a measurable ad medium.
What Grocery TV Actually Sells
There is a genre of retail media narrative that describes the physical store as a media property waiting to be activated. The pitch is that people go to grocery stores; brands would like to reach people; therefore, grocery stores are unrealized advertising inventory. This is roughly correct and roughly ancient. Shopping carts have carried advertisements for decades. The interesting question is not whether the store can be an ad medium. The interesting question is whether the store can be a countable ad medium.
Grocery TV's answer to that has been to install screens with impression measurement, to get its inventory audited by Geopath (the industry body that verifies out-of-home audience data), and to sell advertisers reach numbers they can compare against digital. This is a fairly boring set of design choices. It is also the set of design choices that makes CPG marketing budgets move. "The Geopath stamp of approval for our inventory helps us get the data our customers want when purchasing ad space from us," Nickell has said. That is a sentence that a lot of retail media founders will not say, because a lot of retail media founders are trying to sound like they invented consciousness. Nickell is trying to sound like he invented plumbing.
The Prototype-First Path
Grocery TV was founded in 2016. Its progress has been methodical. The company raised its Series B, $30 million, in April 2022. Total funding across all rounds is around $36 million, according to public reporting. It has about 88 employees. It operates from Austin, Dallas, and New York City. Its stated address is 860 Broadway in New York, a building whose neighbors are generally not grocery stores. This is the standard ad-tech geography of a Texas-born company that has moved a piece of itself to Manhattan to sit closer to the ad buyers.
"We recognized that there was a gap in the grocery market for digital in-store media and focused on building out media products for key areas," Nickell has said. This is a reasonable summary of what happened and also somewhat undersells what happened, which is that the market had been staring at that gap for years and nobody had bothered to build the specific unglamorous set of components required to fill it.
Advertising in a Physics Frame
It is fashionable to note that a physics education is good preparation for a business that has to think carefully about measurement. In Nickell's case it might actually be true. In-store retail media has spent much of its history struggling with the same set of problems: how many people walked past this screen, how many looked, what did they do next, and how much of it can be attributed to the ad rather than to the fact that people who walked into the store had already decided to buy something. The Grocery TV pitch as it is presented publicly is about impression verification and sales lift measurement, not about creative or storytelling. Somebody built the ad-serving stack the way a physicist would build a lab: instrument first, argue later.
"If an advertiser wants high reach or frequency, there is no better place to do so than in a grocery store," Nickell has said. This is a claim that has been true for a long time. What is new is being able to prove it in real time to a media planner in New York who wants a spreadsheet.
The Public Persona
Nickell does not appear to be a founder who gives many personal interviews. Most of his public appearances are on industry stages: the P2PI Retail Media Summit, Advertising Week New York, podcasts about retail media strategy. He speaks in the register of a company that would prefer you to look at the deployment map rather than the founder. The interviews that do exist tend to be about the mechanics of the network, the retailer relationships, and the measurement stack. In one, he described a Grocery TV creative campaign that encouraged shoppers to do calf raises while waiting in the checkout line, which is a very specific kind of place-based advertising joke and also a hint that the company has a sense of humor about what it is doing.
"My path to becoming the CEO of Grocery TV was an unusual journey," Nickell has said. This is the closest thing to a personal-brand statement he has offered publicly.
The Shape of the Bet
Retail media is currently one of the largest growth stories in advertising, but almost all of it is happening on retailer-owned digital surfaces: Amazon's ad business, Walmart Connect, Kroger Precision Marketing. Nickell's bet is that some meaningful percentage of that growth will land in the physical store, where the shopper is closer to the purchase decision, and that whoever owns the audited network of screens will collect a share of the spend that lands there. That thesis has held up long enough to get the company to Series B and 88 employees, but it is still a bet. Grocery TV's job over the next couple of years is to convert a general belief in the return of physical retail media into a specific line item in a media plan.
What makes Nickell an interesting operator inside that bet is that he is not a media executive who learned to work with technology. He is a technologist who ended up running a media company. The distinction shows up in how Grocery TV markets itself: light on narrative, heavy on measurement, unusually candid about what its screens do and do not know. In an industry that runs on story, that is a slightly different pitch.