Adweek: How GSTV Works With Music Artists and Film Companies
by Meseret Ambachew, Adweek
GSTV's chief executive officer and president Sean McCaffrey says his company reaches 40% of people across the U.S.
The digital OOH company invited MGM Studios' CMO during its NewFronts presentation to talk about the success of its content partnership
Retail digital display company GSTV presented at the IAB’s NewFronts for the third time on the event’s final day, held virtually.
The company touted its reach of 105 million people across the U.S., mainly through displaying content at gas pump stations, which is 40% of adults in the country, according to company chief executive officer and president Sean McCaffrey. With the average consumer pumping gas at least three times a month, the company chalks that up to 15 minutes of time spent with its display.
“The experience itself is outside the home when you use that three to four minutes of dead air,” McCaffrey told Adweek.
Gas prices are at an all-time high, but the alarming numbers haven’t appeared to limit GSTV’s ability to cut content partnership deals, driving its ad business and audience growth. And it’s becoming defter at showing the impact of those deals. Through GSTV’s recent partnership with insights company Affinity solutions, the company found it is 50% more efficient than digital video for campaigns like consumer packaged goods.
Raising the volume on music artists
PG County, Maryland native music artist, Reggie Becton, was invited to speak at its presentation. Becton is in a partnership with Live Nation Entertainment, which currently displays four-minute-long content through GSTV.
Artist Reggie Becton saw his listenership almost triple after his Live Nation video featured at Shell gas stations.
The music artist said he received an influx of messages from friends and fans on his Live Nation spotlight video displayed at Shell gas stations. “It was just like wildfire after that,” said Becton.
According to Becton, within two months Becton’s Spotify listenership nearly tripled, his followership on the platform is now over 255,000.
From small screens to big screens
GSTV also highlighted a partnership with film company MGM Studios, where the company used GSTV’s in-house content studio, Ignite, to create content campaigns for its films.
According to GSTV executive vice president and chief marketing officer, Steve Ochs, after MGM’s video takeover campaign to promote The Addams Family 2, MGM tapped GSTV again in February for its Channing Tatum featured film, Dog.
MGM Studio chief marketing officer, Stephen Bruno, noted the current difficulty of encouraging viewers to go to the movies, but GSTV’s method of unexpected creative—plus the time and place—”helped MGM break through the clutter,” said Bruno.
Adweek: GSTV Understands Crisis Messaging to Guide Brands Through Covid-19
By: Doug Zanger | Adweek
Key insights:
The network of screens at gas stations and convenience stores reaches 1 in 3 American adults.
GSTV expects to play an even more vital role, as people who choose to travel this summer will likely do so by car.
As the pandemic continues, brands are determining the best way forward in terms of their messaging to consumers. Like advertising before Covid-19, people were inundated with all kinds of marketing that could simply get lost in the shuffle.
A great deal of advertising has shifted online as people hunkered down at home. Yet essential businesses remained open, including gas stations and the convenience stores attached to them. GSTV—which broadcasts advertising and content at the pump—found that messaging on the platform’s 24,000 locations became essential communication. GSTV reaches one-third of American adults each month and counts Nielsen, Comscore, IRI, Placed and others as data partners.
As quarantine spread across the country, GSTV’s partners, predictably, shifted their messaging to public service announcements from the likes of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Red Cross and Feeding America. Though a pandemic isn’t necessarily in any playbooks, the platform has extensive experience in times of disaster, such as hurricanes, floods and other times when an area goes dark.
“We’ve seen a little bit of a parallel to times like that where important messages need to get out there,” said Sean McCaffrey, GSTV president and CEO.
McCaffrey estimates that in the first few weeks, pandemic-centric advertising accounted for around 90% of the platform’s content.
“We are so grateful to GSTV for their support of our critical Covid-19 messages around social distancing and joining the #StayHome, Save Lives initiative,” said Lisa Sherman, Ad Council president and CEO. “GSTV was one of our first partners to offer their support in the early days of the crisis, and their extraordinary network of gas stations and convenience stores have delivered our time-sensitive messages to over 95 million people across the country.”
“We’ve always been 3-5 minutes of someone’s day running errands,” added McCaffrey. “We realized that those errands were more important because people were stocking up, or are essential workers. At a minimum, people want something informational and, at best, something a little entertaining.”
Interspersed among the ads, for example, was content from the NFL around April’s virtual draft. At present, McCaffrey said about 30% to 40% of the content is directly about Covid-19, with other brand messaging and creative filling the rest of the inventory.
“We’re trying to make sure that it has some uplift, in addition to helping people be safe,” he said, noting the platform’s other content partners such as Cheddar, What’s Trending and Stadium.
According to McCaffrey, brands have asked for flexibility in managing the next steps, seeing very few cancellations, unlike on TV. Categories that seem to be forging ahead are QSR and more long-term businesses such as mortgages and cars, with tweaks to messaging.
“GSTV has been a valuable component of our marketing strategy for years,” said Casey Hurbis, CMO of Quicken Loans. “Whether our campaigns are focused on growing awareness of the Rocket Mortgage brand, or, in recent months, on opportunities to express our gratitude for the heroic front-line workers in the battle against Covid-19.”
Other brands are coming online, including Verizon and Live Nation, with the latter promoting a livestreamed concert series. And Dining at a Distance, a program to help encourage delivery and support of restaurants, continues to make an impact.
“We jumped at the opportunity to support our Dining at a Distance initiative on their platform,” said Pete Stein, CEO of Huge, the agency leading the program. “Because of GSTV’s vast reach, we were able to share Dining at a Distance across 43 markets, reaching a wide audience in a local way that drove action.”
Inquiries about the platform are increasing as brands figure out their playbooks. In the meantime, the conversations with brands revolve mainly around the context of messaging. According to McCaffrey, even though the scope of the pandemic is changing, ensuring that brands get the tone right remains critical.
“If you have a message that’s tone deaf right now, it’s not something that we want [on the platform],” he said.
Looking forward, with all kinds of scenarios emerging around the possible return of Covid-19 cases, McCaffrey said GSTV has learned from its experience with disasters and the pandemic and can move quickly if messaging needs to return to more information-based ads.
“We will always consider the possibility of another outbreak in all of our planning for the next 12-18 months,” he said.
In the end, though, it’s about serving brands, and McCaffrey believes that providing a sense of calm in a hectic time is crucial. The company is planning for the possibility of a busy summer, when consumers may drive more than fly if they choose to travel. Whatever the case, McCaffrey believes that providing a sense of calm in a hectic time is crucial.
“Marketers are consumers first, and everyone is getting whiplash from the data and news cycle. No single partner has all the answers or all the solutions. We know an already complicated job just became exponentially more difficult and is changing in real time. We owe our brand and agency partners the guidance on how to use our massive consumer attention in the right tone and message.”
AgencySpy: MoonPie’s “Super Bowl” Ad Only Ran at Gas Stations
By: Minda Smiley | AgencySpy
In a move that couldn’t be more on brand, MoonPie got in on the Super Bowl action on Sunday by airing an ad of its own … exclusively at gas pumps across America.
To be fair, it’s a sound strategy. We assume the chocolatey marshmallow cakes are a staple at gas stations, and the ad clocks in at 80 seconds, giving patrons more than enough time to fill up their tanks and wonder what the hell they just watched.
Without further ado, here it is.
True MoonPie fans will know that this isn’t a one-off thing. The Chattanooga, Tenn.-based brand—best known for its wry tweets—has been having a bit of fun with what it refers to as #TheBigThing since 2018, when it tweeted out nine faux Super Bowl commercial scripts.
In typical MoonPie fashion, they were incredibly off the wall. Three of them were turned into actual ads the following year, all of which ran online.
This year, the brand took things a step further by elaborating on one of last year’s ads, which featured a “MoonPie Child” meeting its adoptive family. From what we can tell, MoonPie Child doesn’t appear to be enjoying life in suburbia—but hey, at least it got to enjoy its day in the sun on “hundreds of thousands” of fuel pump screens around the country.
The stunt was pulled off in partnership with full-service agency Tombras and GSTV, a network that specializes in video content at gas stations.
“When Tombras approached us, we immediately realized their idea was a stroke of genius—and not just because of the spot’s creative vision,” Sean McCaffrey, president and CEO at GSTV, said. “Brands today know it’s increasingly difficult to find moments when consumer attention is truly focused, so with an unavoidably attention-grabbing spot, and a media buy that leverages the full scale and capabilities of GSTV, it’s the perfect way to stand out.”
All of this begs the question: What will MoonPie do next? Maybe next year we’ll see a local Super Bowl buy, but even that seems too mainstream for its liking. Only time will tell.
Adweek: Marketers Are Getting More Sophisticated in Dissecting Foot Traffic
PlaceIQ launches mobile data dashboard
A few years ago, marketers touted the promise of location-based ads to zap smartphone-wielding consumers with relevant offers and coupons. Now armed with billions of data points, location firms are keen to sell their stats to let brands analyze the data for themselves.
Seven-year-old PlaceIQ is launching a dashboard called LandMark today that allows brands to dig into the firm’s foot traffic data collected from 165 million opted-in consumers. Marketers can zero in on specific markets and locations to see how many people are passing through a store versus going into a competitor’s stores, for example. Or an automaker can track dealership visits to examine consumers who own a vehicle made by a competitor. PlaceIQ began testing the tool with companies including Havas Media, The Media Kitchen, IPG-owned Ansible and Gas Station TV for about a year before making it widely available, said CEO and co-founder Duncan McCall.
“All this data that we’ve been working to make sense of for the last seven years—if you strip it away and say, ‘what is the ultimate value proposition?’ It’s really this data set that connects people, places and things,” he said. “It’s not just mobile. You can apply it across television, across out of home.”
Marketers use PlaceIQ’s software to slice up data by factors like DMA, category of business and date. For example, a marketer could home in on Florida to compare how busy Chick-fil-A and Buffalo Wild Wings restaurants are during spring break. More specifically, a stat called share of visit divides the total number of store visits by the number of locations to look at relative busyness at a store-specific level.
In another example, McCall compared Walmart and Costco’s holiday traffic. Overall, Walmart has more traffic because the brand has more stores, but Costco has a higher share of visits, particularly in the days leading up to big holidays like Thanksgiving or Black Friday when the chain is closed while Walmart remains open. “This allows you to see a very different strategy for Black Friday,” McCall explained. “Walmart wins on Black Friday for busyness but it actually loses a few days before Black Friday—Costco drives everyone into their stores a few days before.”
PlaceIQ is targeting agencies, analytics and data teams at brands and consultancies with LandMark. For media agencies, mobile data helps to plan traditional media. The firm has a deal with comScore that matches up location stats with census data collected from set tops to find people who watch a TV station and then come into a store, for example.
“Agencies are trying to understand, ‘how do I better plan media—do I plan analytics before I plan creative?’” McCall said. “They can query this system and see, ‘I’m winning against these brands and I’m losing against these brands here. Let’s construct a media campaign to heavy up on TV to hit these types of people.’”
Robert Lamberson, director of analytics at Ansible added, “LandMark allows us to understand potential customer segments in unique ways, such as ongoing visitation frequency to one brand against another, average distance traveled by customers to brands and visitation trends down to specific DMAs. These unique insights allow us to inform strategy for our clients on both a national and local level.”
When asked how much of PlaceIQ’s business is based on the more basic tactic of plugging location data into mobile ads, McCall said, “That’s a small part of our business—that’s become a simplistic, blunt instrument but the bigger piece in there is behavioral targeting.”
PlaceIQ faces tough competition in data and analytics as more location-minded firms move in on the space. In March, Foursquare launched a data dashboard and xAd has also recently played up the real-world potential of smartphone-collected stats.
Still, McCall is seemingly confident in his pitch, partly because he believes he’s following a stream of new money that brands are willing to pony up for location-based stats. After years of traditionally outsourcing data and analytics, brands are now staffing up internal teams with data and analytics experts tasked with larger goals of overhauling companies to be more digital and competitive.
“When you [used to] talk to people about foot-traffic analytics, they would say, ‘I have no budget to pay for this. Let me activate advertising and you give me the analytics on the back of advertising,’” McCall said. “It used to be that analytics and research were completely disjointed from advertising. In today’s world, you have that joint. People are spending money on the data and the analytics, but it’s really informing a much greater [type of] intelligent marketing.”
Lauren Johnson, Adweek
Adweek: State Farm is Targeting Location-Based Ads at Gas Stations
18,000 locations are getting equipped with digital screens
If you regularly fill your tank at a gas station, chances are you’ve spent a few minutes standing idly by your car. Now, advertisers want to serve you ads while you wait.
State Farm is running video ads on digital screens built into the pumps at 18,000 national gas stations as part of a partnership between Gas Station TV and payment company Verifone. The screens loop through a four- to five-minute segment featuring content from ESPN, CNN and Bloomberg that run alongside short national and local commercials from brands like State Farm. Each station’s screens can be customized to pull in either local or national content.
“State Farm has an interest in reaching the driving public,” said Edward Gold, advertising director at State Farm. “While we can do that on television and online video, when you have somebody who is actually driving a car, experiencing their car, taking care of their car and therefore thinking about their car, it’s a great opportunity for us.”
GSTV and Verifone claim their network of digital screens reaches one in three adults and 75 million unique monthly viewers. According to David Leider, president and CEO of Gas Station TV, 69 percent of that audience is between the ages of 18 and 49, a group of cord-cutting consumers who are increasingly watching video in ways other than linear TV. “We like to say that the audience is tied to that screen with a rubber hose for about five minutes—it’s a very captive, locked-down audience,” Leider said.
State Farm bought ads through GSTV in 2015 and ran a study through Lieberman Research in which 48 percent of respondents recalled seeing a State Farm ad, and 69 percent said they’d consider the company the next time they shopped for insurance.
State Farm’s Gold said the new work is part of a bigger plan to beef up the brand’s location-based advertising efforts, which also include piloting sponsored promos in online community platform Nextdoor.
“Local advertising is always something that we do, but then our ability to target people whether we know that they’re in a specific area—let’s say the northern suburb of Chicago—might be a little better market for us than the downtown area of Chicago,” Gold said. “Then when you start looking at location-based advertising opportunities, even from where the cellphone is at, and how we can target someone who has been standing on an auto dealership lot for five minutes, which means they’re either getting their car fixed or they’re shopping for a new car, we’re definitely getting more into very specific location-based opportunities.”
Lauren Johnson | Adweek