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.
MediaPost: Pumping Sales: Q&A With GSTV's Sean McCaffrey
by Todd Wasserman, MediaPost
Now that the amount of time people spend in front of the television has been declining over the past decade, traditional TV is no longer the sure thing it used to be for getting in front of viewers.
One alternative is GSTV, a network of programming at the gas pumps. GSTV claims an audience of 104 million monthly unique viewers. For three to five minutes, GSTV gets access to consumers while they have not much else to do but pump their gas.
Since launching in 2005, GSTV has expanded to 25,000 locations at 7-Eleven, BP, Chevron and Gulf, among others. GSTV viewing has also soared during the pandemic, as PepsiCo and other major advertisers came on board.
We spoke with Sean McCaffrey, president and CEO of GSTV, about the network. Below are some excerpts from that conversation.
Marketing Daily: Do you have stats on how many people pay attention to GSTV? I assume it comes on when they start pumping, but how do you know they’re not looking away or listening to their own devices?
Sean McCaffrey: We take the time we have with our viewers while they are fueling up very seriously. In those three to five minutes, we want to supply our viewers with an entertaining and informative respite in their day, and the content experience that we’ve programmed reflects this.
From our 2021 Audience Insights study, we know that 89% of consumers watch and listen to GSTV. That amounts to 104 million unique viewers each month giving GSTV their 1:1 attention, or 2.5x more attentive to ads on GSTV than ads on linear TV, and 3.2x more attentive to ads on connected TV.
Marketing Daily: What are the products that you find get the best pickup when advertised on GSTV? What are some opportunities you see that are so far unexploited?
Sean McCaffrey: We work with advertisers across a wide array of categories, some that one would expect to see on GSTV, and some that may be more unexpected, but perform equally well. The success of our advertisers is leveraging GSTV to capture consumers who are not just fueling up, but out and about and in the mindset of making their next purchase decision for today’s lunch, this afternoon’s activity, tonight’s show to watch, next month’s vacation, a new car this summer, and beyond.
Being steps away from convenience stores, packaged foods and bottled beverages make a lot of sense for GSTV. However, we also know that on the day that consumers are fueling up, they are often making other stops as well -- and GSTV is one of the last full sight, sound, and motion screens they are paying attention to in the last mile of their consumer journey.
Because of this, we’ve found success for CPG brands looking to drive purchase decisions across retail channels, whether it be grocery, drug, or big box. We also know that our viewers eat and drink a lot, so QSRs have found success partnering with GSTV.
Likewise, automotive (our viewers are drivers), entertainment, financial services and travel are also categories that are unexpected but have performed well on GSTV because our viewers are in the right mindset.
Every ad impression, for example, is also a payment transaction, so for a financial advertiser, say, it’s a highly contextual moment to talk to consumers about their relationship to their money, household budget, financial wellness, etc.
Marketing Daily: What do electric cars mean for the long-term prospects for GSTV?
Sean McCaffrey: Regardless of the type of fuel, we are in the business of following the consumer journey. We know that electric cars are on the rise, and we’re keeping pace with consumer adoption.
We’re a partner alongside those who are fueling the evolution of transportation -- retailers, auto OEMs, major energy companies. We all know this is a rapidly evolving industry and we look forward to what’s to come for the intersection of consumer transportation and media.
Our business has been growing over the past few years -- not only in the footprint of our network and size of our audience, but also in the variety of brands partnering with us and the success of delivering on outcomes -- and we will continue to innovate around reaching consumers at the right time, right place, and right moment.
Marketing Daily: Gas prices have spiked recently. Do you find that rising prices makes GSTV consumers less receptive to ads? Why or why not?
Sean McCaffrey: We have not found a connection between the price of fuel and a consumer’s receptivity towards what’s on the screens. Our content experience is designed to entertain and inform based on audience insights, and that does not fluctuate with changing consumer prices.
Marketing Daily: What about when someone walks into a convenience store/gas station that has GSTV? Are there reminders in-store? How do they work?
Sean McCaffrey: According to our Audience Insights study, 62% of fuelers visited the C-store on their most recent visit to the gas station. Our primary aim is to entertain, inform and connect with our audience of drivers filling up at the 28,000+ fuel retailers with GSTV screens across the U.S., and also to best serve the advertisers and retailers who partner with us.
We do this best by partnering with brands, agencies, and retailers to reach consumers at the right time, right place, and right moment -- and in that right mindset -- about their next stop post-fuel-up. We work with our fuel retailer partners to use messaging that shares their latest promotions on our screens to drive customers into the C-store, and we work with brands to direct consumers with creative best practices and calls-to-action relevant to their campaigns.
Adweek: Deepfakes At The Gas Pump Scares Up Data Privacy Awareness
The video is part of a follow-up campaign to viral 2011 stunt 'Take This Lollipop'
By Patrick Kulp | Adweek
GSTV host Maria Menounos' face is replaced with deepfake technology. Take This Lollipop
Tens of millions of Americans filling their gas tanks this week may be in for a fright at the pump this season. No, it’s not about gas prices. Rather, it’s what is expected to happen from viewing a creepy campaign about privacy issues being shown on screens at the 24,000 Gas Station TV (GSTV) locations across the country.
The scene shows the friendly face of the TV anchor at the pump transforming into the villainous visage of a man with a sinisterly voiced warning about digital data collection.
The stunt, which involved using deepfake technology to replace the face of GSTV host Maria Menounos, is part of a new online privacy campaign that also includes a hair-raising Zoom video experience putting viewers in the center of a horror movie-like plot via their webcam.
The entire project is a belated follow-up to a 2011 viral stunt called “Take This Lollipop,” a Facebook app that captivated a more innocent generation of social media user with videos of the same ominous character reciting data about each viewer collected through Facebook’s data-sharing practices.
Creators Jason Zada, a film director, and Jason Nickel, a developer, said they hoped to reprise the success of that effort and the awareness it brought to Facebook’s data policies, but were waiting for the right cause.
“We took our time only because it really felt like we needed to find the right idea with the right piece of technology at the right time,” Zada said.
“It just so happened that a pandemic made that possible with this massive shift in technology and social communication–everybody started using Zoom,” he continued. “So the question was, ‘How can we use this current time in society in technology to our advantage and take something that we all rely upon, and and sort of twist it and turn it around a bit?'”
The result is an approximately 4-minute long Zoom video experience that detects your face and places the viewer in a Zoom call with three actors, two of whom—spoilers ahead—are spirited away by some unknown entity in suspenseful fashion before an augmented reality figure appears in the background of the viewer’s own room. The remaining participant then reveals herself to be the campaign’s trademark villain.
Zada and Nickel said the original goal had been to deepfake each viewer in real-time, but they couldn’t pull off the the technology in time for the launch. Instead, they decided to incorporate the deepfake element into a deal with GSTV and Menounos to hijack her regular segment with an ominous message.
“The general idea was that Halloween has been cancelled for the most part for a lot of people. Even brands have been shifting away from doing anything Halloween-related this year. And it seemed like the perfect opportunity,” Zada said.
“But you mix that with an election year in which there are these deep fakes that exist, there is AI, there is the hacking of the election, there’s the hacking of just general politics,” he added. “It was kind of interesting to look at how we could use deepfake in a more consumer-friendly way and show people that like, ‘I could access you–not your data anymore—but I could access you, I could recreate you, I could become you.'”
A recent survey of researchers ranked deepfakes as the number-one cyber-criminal threat posed by AI. Its nefarious potential extends beyond the creation of fake news footage of public figures–an oft-discussed threat that has yet to materialize in any significant way beyond YouTube gags, per deepfake tracking platform Sensity. Other areas of concern include identity theft, video call scam extortion and its most prevalent use as of a source of non-consensual pornography.
Despite those fears, advertisers have been latching onto the tech as a way to circumvent production constraints brought on by the pandemic or spread political messages.
Meanwhile, Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal has made the issue tackled by the first “Take This Lollipop” campaign a critical national political issue that played a role in the 2016 election. Could they end up being as prescient this time around?
“We’ve always been a fan of just exploring future business models around content, entertainment and technology that I think we’re going to rely upon it more and more,” Zada said. “It’s a great time to be a storyteller, in terms of being able to use technology to power and enable original entertainment that breaks new ground.”
AdAge: 'Take This Lollipop' Returns To Teach A Creepy Lesson About Deepfakes
Jason Zada's viral Facebook app gets a follow-up featuring new tech scares
By I-Hsien Sherwood | AdAge
In 2011, a creepy Facebook app called Take This Lollipop went viral. It used private data captured by the platform to send viewers on a customized horror adventure, stalked by a tech-savvy villain who pinpointed the locations of their actual houses.
Now, nine years later, creator Jason Zada is back with a sequel that taps into the danger of a new type of digital technology: deepfakes. While advertisers and satirists have used the tech to fake words from world leaders, it isn’t only celebrities who can end up in seemingly compromising positions or appear to say things they didn’t. Consumer-level apps have been banned for faking nudes of women and underage girls.
In “Take This Lollipop 2,” Bill Oberst Jr. returns as the stalker, only this time he steals viewers' faces, showing how far the tech has come from its early days, when algorithms needed hours of footage of a person to emulate their features. "Take This Lollipop" is now a dedicated site that uses webcam footage to put viewers in the film, which looks like a video chat service, complete with an AI-powered interactive chat window. One-by-one, the other viewers meet a terrible fate
Zada directed the interactive short, which was built by Imposium and enlisted the skills of deepfake artist birbfakes. Promos feature Maria Menunous of GSTV.