Convenience Store News: Make Converts Out of Gas-Only Customers

By: Tammy Mastroberte | Convenience Store News

In the June issue of Convenience Store News, GSTV’s Eric Sherman, SVP, Insights & Analytics, and Dan Trotzer, EVP, Industry speak to the challenge fuel retailers face in pump-to-store conversions, and showcase how GSTV has become a valuable asset for capturing consumer attention and driving foot traffic.

Read the article HERE.

In 2020, Content Diversification Will be Brands’ Top Challenge and Opportunity

Lack of order and predictability in how content is consumed is reaching new scale; budgets are shifting to reflect it 

Sean McCaffrey, President and CEO, GSTV  | Abridged version on Campaign

As CEO of a national media network, I spend the majority of my time meeting with global brands across nearly every consumer category, to better understand how they’re specifically solving marketing problems. The buzzwords may change, but core challenges often remain the same. And all involve driving business and brand growth with marketing expected to deliver as a key growth driver.  What they share paints a picture of the problems they’re facing now, and the headwinds they’re planning for in 2020.

The through-line in 2019 is that the forces impacting their marketing are guided by the invisible hand of content diversification - both the cause of and solution to these problems. As consumers spread out in pursuit of their interests, the smartest people in our industry devise ways to turn that differentiation into usable data that can help brands get closer to them. The data-driven debate has raged for the past decade on targeting vs scale, reach vs personalization, and brand vs growth marketing. 

In 2020, consumers ready to scroll and skip at scale, will crash headlong into other trends that create new challenges and opportunities. Below are a collection of topics and trends from my conversations with brands, each of which is grappling with a shift in the content landscape, with notes on their approach to adapting. 

TV TUNE OUT & CONTENT CONSUMPTION SHIFTS

A November report from eMarketer suggests that linear budgets will drop below 30% of total spend next year, for the first time ever. The question for brands whose dollars are part of that $2.4b dollar spending gap, is: how will they spend it, if not on TV?

Behind this massive shift is the continued decline in broadcast viewership, which is perhaps the biggest driver of change impacting marketing today. While TV was at the center of the Big Bang that led to the the narrative-driven advertising universe we all emerged from, today it more closely resembles a star that’s about to implode.

Disney+, HBO Max, Apple TV+, NBC’s Peacock, Hulu, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok and many others are filling the void. Baby Yoda aside, the wars being waged by all of these companies as they pursue advertiser dollars are anything but cute. And the rise of more services, subscriptions and consumer control is a boon for content bingers, but yet again a challenge for marketers to balance reach, targeting and strategy in a media plan needing to solve serious marketing challenges.

Brands have to navigate them all, which means their budgets need to be built for agility. The days of set-it-and-forget-it are long gone; brands need to know where every dollar was spent and what it did for the brand, no questions asked.

Take Hershey’s for example. Six years ago, they were convinced linear TV was the way to go, representing 97% of their budget. This year, linear is under 50%, underscoring that diversifying their media investment is key for growing their brands and reaching new customers.

Of course, TV isn’t going down without a fight. Earlier this year, Nielsen announced it will be counting “out of home” viewing – watching via mobile, in hotels, restaurants and at other people’s houses – to give a clearer picture of true audience size. As the trend away from TV isn’t slowing, this likely won’t solve the problem, but it will soften the blow.

EXTERNAL PRESSURES: SUMMER OLYMPICS & PRESIDENTIAL RACE 

Layering onto the shifts in consumer content consumption, and fight for attention in 2020, are external pressures like the summer Olympics and the presidential race. They’ll live on TV (broadcast, cable and satellite alike), digital (in the form of media coverage and video) and social (breaking news and video). They will occupy mindshare, but also dominate the year in terms of available ad inventory, driving up prices and demand (per eMarketer, not enough to offset total losses for the year), again distorting the environment for brand and consumer connection.

The unprepared will be left to search for advertising platforms that can help them mitigate the lack of air time and walled garden real estate. A year ago, it would have been a safe bet that dollars not spent on linear would shift to digital, but brand safety, fraud and viewability are still challenges in digital media, and there seem to be enough new places for brands to go that digital is a bit stagnant. 

For brands I’m speaking with, OTT is a pricey, confusing and still untested alternative, considered a “broadcast inventory extension” for obvious reasons, but showing promising signs of being able to validate itself from an ROI perspective. Influencers, podcasts, and OOH are all surging too, yet none of these alone are enough to give marketers the scale they need, according to the biggest brands in the country.

The takeaway for any brand trying to reach consumers: rather than fight for space among crowded inventory, refresh your media mix with new platforms that give scale and an engaged audience where you’re out of that fray. 

WHAT’S COOL AGAIN: OOH & AUDIO

Podcasting fits perfectly into content diversification as it’s a key format consumers have turned to as they turn away from TV. Per IAB, marketers will have spent $479 million on podcasts by the end of 2019, a 53 percent jump from 2017. Brands believe that, in the moment of the aural environment, messages resonate when aligned with the right content. 

Further, we’ve come out the other side of mobile growth to realize data and personalization and targeting still can’t always earn you attention in a sea of scrolling (300 feet or more per day now), ad blocking and so on. So the world’s oldest and largest creative canvas – OOH – is once again the shiniest new object to meet consumers on their time and dime, and bring them information, entertainment, utility and value.

To that end, OOH revenue grew 7% in Q3 to nearly $6.4 billion. This figure is a reminder of how big TV is – that amount is roughly how much linear will lose in 2020. So the OOH space continues to heat up as the largest brands, from McDonald’s, Geico, Apple, State Farm, Chevrolet, Amazon, Facebook, Anheuser-Busch, AT&T, and HBO accelerate spend and use. 

Both OOH and Podcasting are seeing technological advancements that will keep them hot in 2020, namely programmatic capabilities that will extend their run as the cool kids on the block, and lead to the emergence of indirect paths to utilization.

Worth noting here: it wasn’t long ago that both audio and OOH were the least interesting media buys available. So while TV may be on the decline, it could be the hottest new platform in just a couple of years. Marketers are telling me that they continually interrogate their own assumptions about media partners, channels and choices as new innovation and efficiency does exist beyond the latest ad-tech play. 

SUCCESS STARTS AND ENDS WITH ATTENTION 

I wrote earlier this year that the cost of consumer attention is ROI. We’re asking consumers to apply their minds to our messages at moments where that isn’t possible. It’s the natural effect of content diversification - as we’re given more options for things to look at, we have less attention to give any particular thing. 

Consider your own TV viewing habits. Are you fully engaged all the time? The old adage that we run to the kitchen during the commercial now fights with the notion that we’re on our phones, passively watching as we scroll Amazon. When we’re scrolling, we’re blind to the ads that are passing through our feeds (for the products we bought weeks ago, and returned). 

Consumer behavior is a moving target, and a tricky one to ever nail down. For that reason, attention has once again captured mindshare across the market. Where can I find engaged, captive audiences, and what is being done to maintain that attention? Those attentive moments are the ones that matter for brands. 

The most interesting brands I speak to all reference a similar theme: there is often innovation hiding in plain sight.

CONCLUSION 

While the growing availability of content and decreasing attention spans makes 2020 out to be a chaotic year to navigate, it’s quite the opposite. There is great reward ahead for brand leaders ready to embrace the unknown and realize the strongest accelerant for marketing success is embracing the disruption by finding balance in the art and science.

Dare to be bold by challenging creativity beyond the creative. Build a media strategy that’s agile and welcomes incorporating platforms that can reach attentive consumers and deliver results at scale. Be OK with trying something new, and that might mean something so-called old that’s newly relevant again. The same goes for failing, if doing so means uncovering  insights on consumer trends or discovering messaging that stood out. At GSTV, we’re bullish about the new year because these trends will challenge brands to think about what’s important to them -- audience, engagement, agility, and delivering on growth outcomes. Here’s to a great year.

Digiday: ‘An extension of our broadcast buy’: Advertisers are buying ads on gas station screens

People probably don’t pull up to the gas station pump to watch videos, let alone to sit through ads. But while they wait for their tanks to fill, there’s enough chance that they’ll check out what’s playing at the pump that advertisers including PepsiCo and Quicken Loans, and agencies such as Spark Foundry see GSTV’s gas station screens less as a billboard and more as another TV screen.

PepsiCo has begun to consider GSTV to be part of its video strategy as the company has adopted “more of a video-agnostic approach” with that strategy over the past couple years, said Kate Brady, head of media innovation and partnerships at PepsiCo. That shift has helped with analyzing the effectiveness of the marketer’s GSTV campaigns. “Because you have a captive, engaged audience [on GSTV], we see that to be stronger than what we might see on many of our digital video results and some of our outdoor as well,” said Brady, who declined to share specific results.

Spark Foundry has similarly reevaluated what it considers video in recent years. About two and a half years ago, the agency combined all video platforms, whether in-home or out-of-home, under the purview of its video team, said Shelby Saville, chief investment officer at Spark Foundry. That move enabled the agency to take a more complete view of the video landscape and find opportunities to extend the reach of TV and video campaigns “in case we’re not getting the reach we want in traditional TV or digital video,” she said. The agency uses GSTV to drive foot traffic for clients with quick-serve restaurants and retail stores, in particular.

The executives interviewed for this article declined to discuss GSTV’s ad rates, but Quicken Loans CMO Casey Hurbis described the company’s pricing as “fair and consistent.”

GSTV streams videos and ads over the internet to its screens that span more than 23,000 locations across the country. That internet-based delivery enables GSTV to aim ads at individual locations, which enables advertisers to use GSTV to supplement the reach and frequency of their TV and video campaigns. Additionally it works with companies like Nielsen to cross-reference credit card data from gas stations, including their adjoining convenience stores, with advertisers’ first-party data in order to pinpoint brands’ ads and measure their sales impact.

As audiences tune out of traditional TV and into ad-free fare like Netflix, advertisers are seeking out all opportunities to reach people with their 15-second spots. For these marketers, GSTV has emerged as one of those opportunities despite being historically categorized alongside billboards and bus stop signage as an out-of-home platform. “We’ve had a couple clients and teams recommend [GSTV] be used as a frequency extension if we feel like there’s an audience that’s being underserved in television,” said Saville.

GSTV has been looking to capitalize on ad buyers’ interest in opportunities to offset TV viewership declines by angling to compete in the annual TV-and-video upfront marketplace. This year the company has had more than two dozen meetings with advertisers to pitch for their upfront budgets, according to GSTV CEO Sean McCaffrey. In those pitches, the company has talked up the 93 million adults in the U.S. that it claims it reaches every month, as measured by Nielsen, — up from 75 million adults in 2018 — as well as the TV-like qualities of its ads that play at full screen with the sound on between videos from media companies such as Cheddar, First Media and Chive TV as well as sports leagues like the NFL and NHL.

One question that GSTV faces as it angles for advertisers’ TV and video dollars is whether people are actually watching its screens while they pump gas. And it appears that people do watch. The company performs eye-tracking studies and consumer surveys to measure viewership. In a pitch deck that GSTV has shared with advertisers and agencies this year, the company claims that 86% of people watch or listen to the screens. For PepsiCo, the question of GSTV’s viewability has not been an issue. The company has conducted brand recall and purchase intent studies for its GSTV campaigns, and the results of those studios “make us confident that it’s working,” Brady said.

While GSTV may seem to be an odd fit in the upfront consideration set, it has been able to merit consideration alongside TV networks and digital video platforms. “When we go into the upfronts, GSTV has historically been one of the partners where we make an annual upfront investment,” said Casey Hurbis, CMO of Quicken Loans. He has been buying ads on GSTV for at least seven years, dating back to when he was an automotive marketer at Fiat Chrysler Automotive and where he said GSTV was viewed as a cable network. “I’ve never really looked at [GSTV] as an out-of-home placement. I look at it as an extension of our broadcast buy,” said Hurbis.