banner_cats is a multiselect field. This field will contain an array of category IDs and will be stored as a serialized array. You can’t do "IN" or "=" here.
To match this you need to do something like this:
array(
'key' => 'banner_cats',
'value' => '"'.$cat_id.'"',
'compare' => 'LIKE',
)
Notice the double quotes include in the value. This is so that 1 will only match 1 and not 10, 20.
To do something resembling an “IN” you would need to loop through the list of categories and create a “LIKE” query for each of them.
The reason that you get nothing is that the meta queries on banner_cats and banner_towns are retuning nothing.
Hope that helps.
~JH
