MediaPost: Gas Station TV Saw You Coming, Can Guess Where You're Going
GSTV, the company that puts TVs (and ads) at gas station pumps in 200 markets nationwide, has upped its analytics in ways it says give advertisers a carload of data about who is pumping that gas and what they’re up to.
GSTV screens are in some 18,000 gas stations, and for most of the people who stop to fuel up, where they’re going next is more or less a given: They’re headed home, to work -- or maybe best of all, to go shopping.
Concerning the latter activity, GSTV says its viewers spend 1.7X more in the hours right after pumping their car. And putting a message before consumers right before they are about to consume is a pretty good place for an advertiser to be, they claim.
Drive-thru restaurants like Wendy’s are good clients. So are Pepsi, General Motors, Capital One, AT&T, Comcast, Citibank and State Farm.
The company just unveiled Octane, an analytical concoction that analyses transactional, geospatial and digital behavioral data. It purports to know that gas station visitor backward and forward.
That’s a stew the customer has already provided the ingredients to create, right down to their cell phone’s GPS. The company teamed with analytics and research providers Acxiom, Placed, Dstillery, IRi and Nielsen to create an extensive package of data.
“When credit card transactions occur at our locations, we’re able to work with our data partners to understand, in aggregate, what kinds of transactions customers make before or after they buy,” explains Eric Sherman, a former Twitter and NBC Universal executive who is the senior vice president for insights and analytics.
“The fuel transaction at the GSTV location provides the link. From consumers who have opted in to location-sharing on their mobile devices, we can understand how such consumers behave before or after visiting a station by analyzing mobility patterns associated with these devices.” (The data is anonymized.)
Though one brand of gasoline is pretty much like the other, not all gas stations are equal. “I was at a gas station the other day and it hit me -- there was a BMW, a Range Rover and Mercedes there with me,” says Sean McCaffrey, the GSTV CEO. Stations, by location and proximity to certain kinds of shopping places, can draw a disproportionate share of well-heeled drivers.
Sherman knows those car nameplates mean something. “At a GSTV location, are the viewers in front of our screens more likely to have visited a Lexus dealership in the past 30 days? A Lululemon store? A DollarTree? Understanding this data on a location-by-location basis helps us advise clients.”
McCaffrey, with a background at IHeartMedia and Clear Channel Outdoor, arrived at GSTV (in a nice car, presumably) last year when GSTV and gas station TV competitor Verifone entered into a joint venture combining the assets of each. The analytic and deal-making ramp-up began shortly after.
Like other out-of-home services, GSTV fights to be taken as equal to more traditional media, and it’s increased efforts to make GSTV more responsive.
It recently hired Scott Pawlowski, formerly national vertical sales leader for Quantcast, as an executive vice president of client services. It also has a new content deal with Cheddar news and Chive TV, among others like The Stadium, CNN Headline News, Bloomberg TV and AccuWeather.
The gas pump TV company claims to reach 75 million unique viewers every month, and that includes one in three adults over 18.
And like TV and the Internet, it deals with criticism that its viewers aren’t really paying attention. Sherman says 87% of its gas-pumping viewers watch or listen to the GSTV telecast, and its recall is about twice what linear TV gets from its viewers.
“While some people may step away from the pump during fueling,” he says, “compare that to during traditional TV commercial breaks.” TV viewers flee to kitchens, bathrooms or use remotes to skip the ads altogether when commercials appear, he claims. “That doesn’t happen on GSTV.”
QSR Brands: Digital Video Can Work Harder to Reach Your Customers
By Sean McCaffrey, President and CEO of GSTV
As hungry consumers hit the road this summer, QSR brands are spending big on digital video, particularly mobile, with high expectations of heavy foot traffic to match their spend.
According to a recent study by IAB, 59% of marketers’ digital ad budgets are allocated to digital video already and more than half of buyers plan to increase spending by 53% during the next year.
I’m amazed at how often I hear brands discuss with confidence their strategic media plans for reaching travelers. Often, they over-index on digital video, particularly via mobile, as the solution.
Millions of dollars later, the question remains: Are consumers seeing your videos in the context that best serves your restaurants? There’s a good chance they won’t be in the right place at the right time— or in the right mindset— to make your ROAS the best it could be.
Consider that some 70% of mobile device usage now takes place in the home, and those that do watch on-the-go are 17% more likely to skip mobile video ads (source: Pew; Magna and IPG Media Lab).
Though we may be experiencing the so-called Golden Age of Television, Millennials — who spend more money eating out than any other generation — aren’t watching when it needs to count for your QSR. Reporting from Restaurant Marketing Labs shows that trend will only balloon as the mobile-first, short(er) attention span Generation Z will surpass Millennials to become the most influential market by 2020.
So, where does that leave mobile video in terms of reaching on-the-go consumers? Rather than try to motivate a consumer to get off their couch for your new green juice or breakfast sandwich, it’s easier to tempt them on-the-go. But not necessarily always on their phones.
We set out to understand the habits of these consumers through a third-party study by MasterCard and Placed examining the consumer journey following a fuel transaction. Analysis found that within an hour of filling up, fuel customers transact 54% more and spend 46% more at QSR (vs. non-fuel buyers). QSR campaigns on GSTV have driven double-digit incremental lift in store visitation.
Digital video is clearly still popular with consumers, it just isn’t increasing the total time your consumer spends engaged with your brand. Location-targeted ads are the single most effective display advertising strategy for QSRs across online and mobile, according to Mobile Marketer. That study showed consumers were three times more likely to visit an advertiser’s store when they were served a geo-fenced ad nearby.
I always enjoyed marketing expert and author Tom Goodwin’s take on mobile, which is that it’s a behavior, not a channel. Behaviors are highly complex and difficult to track, making mobile video anything but the panacea many believe it to be. It’s an ever-evolving advertising puzzle for QSR. The key is to stay as nimble as your consumers.
QSRs need a more focused model for reaching an increasingly elusive and frenetic target audience. In my view, the best digital video campaigns for the industry will reach key consumers when they’re active, more likely to spend and — most importantly — when they are hungry.
MediaPost: When Is Using A Cellphone Not Mobile Usage?
By Sean McCaffrey | MediaPost
As the penetration of mobile devices reaches near saturation in America, quantitative data alone becomes an inadequate guide as to how to target consumers when and where they have intent to purchase. Advertisers seek newer media formats for reaching consumers, with a renewed emphasis on qualitative data.
With sea change about in data use and media decisions, reaching the right consumer in the right context at the right time is still paramount to driving real business growth.
Some of those new media have actually been hiding in plain sight, among them video advertising at fuel stations and, particularly so, in summer.
According to Pew, some 70% of mobile device usage now takes place in the home with 99% of consumers using devices there every week. Additionally, the two next most frequent places of weekly use are “in transit” (82%) and at work (69%), neither of which may involve a “ready to purchase” context.
These are not surprising research findings, but they highlight the need for more creative and lateral thinking from marketers. That’s particularly so when you realize mobile video consumers are most often watching at home, according to recent research by the Streaming Video Alliance — and those that do watch on the go are 17+% more likely to skip mobile video ads, per Magna and IPG Media Lab. This all makes it even harder for traditional advertising media to reach consumers during the summer months when we’re leading even more active lives.
For advertisers, the situation will get worse next quarter thanks to external factors. Chief among them is the continuing demise in the audience numbers watching more traditional television, which is subject to an even more dramatic seasonal decline in summer.
There is also real pressure on air-time as we contemplate a fall season full of political advertising ahead of the November midterms. Given the requirement for media outlets to squeeze in as much on-air political balance as possible, the cost of other airtime soars, creating a very real trickle-down effect into the summer months. Non-political advertisers will seek better value ahead of September and October.
Increased demand inevitably leads to higher costs — particularly in digital budgets, where 60% of the spend is now in video, according to IAB. These increases come despite evidence that consumers are not spending more total time with video and that millennial consumption of television continues its inexorable decline. What’s more, it is easier today for consumers to curate their own content without recourse to an advertiser-funded media now that free, owned and subscription media are all stealing the other’s lunch.
Where to find consumers with both the time and, importantly, the disposition to engage with brand content and advertising in the summer months, preferably near a point of purchase? The fuel station is a previously overlooked, but relatively obvious, media location. The weekly or twice-weekly fill-up is often a crucial few moments ahead of a grocery or other shopping trip, or journey to an event, QSR stop, picnic or cookout, the beach or any other summer activity.
Brands need to be prepared for the challenges the summer will inevitably bring, whether they’re political or behavioral, or the host of better-known issues like brand safety, fraud or even GDPR; these things will have an impact. The only question you should be asking is, what are you doing to mitigate them? And where is there previously untapped opportunity to find real impact and engagement amongst all the disruption?
The Drum: Four Unexpected, Data-Driven Media Buys For Quickly Boosting Sales
By Sean McCaffrey | The Drum
Of all the topics that come up in my conversations with brands, agencies, media and data/analytics partners, how to quickly boost sales is always a common one. Even though most brands plan their media spending annually, every marketer should have a deep bench of partners they know have a higher likelihood of driving sales without the long lead. Oh, and that can leverage the most relevant data resources on the market.
For brands wanting to know who they can call today to have a data-enriched campaign running tomorrow (or maybe next week), with a degree of certainty that they’ll see some lift, read on.
To hone the list, I’ve put recency in the crosshairs, which means we’re not talking about TV, mobile, social or any of the usual suspects. Why recency? Recency theory holds that ads are most effective when they air “immediately before the time of decision” per Nielsen. Brands shouldn’t overlook recency when considering where to place media, especially if making the sale is their immediate goal.
Paul Macaluso, chief executive at the fast-growing quick-serve restaurant Krystal, told QSR Magazine last week that recency is one of the most important elements of restaurant marketing.
“We need to be in front of people when they’re thinking about food or when they’re hungry. It’s just not TV anymore,” he says. “Certainly not predominantly TV anymore.”
Sometimes the simple answer is the right one. Here are a few to consider.
Intersection’s Link kiosks
With a monthly reach of 44m (Source: Geopath), anyone walking the streets of New York or London has seen a Link kiosk. It’s the sleek digital obelisks that offer beautifully displayed content, free wifi, phone calls, device charging and tablets for local search. These are savvy technologies that are only growing in number.
And given that almost every major retailer, QSR/fast-casual, finance, travel - and so many other business categories - sell in New York and London, Link is a recency goldmine. In these urban markets, you can combine recency with proximity - consider a promotion for financial services. Link makes sense for consumers who are directly outside or blocks away from the institution.
Cinema
Cinemas present a unique option among this list because moviegoers are a captive audience, unable to opt-out. They’re sitting down, noshing, and relaxed because all they’re doing for the next 90 minutes is watching a flick. It’s an opportunity for a brand to say hello and ask for their consideration.
With the evolution of the movie theater to include reclining chairs and alcoholic beverages, consumers may be more likely to arrive on time, snacks and all. And for theaters located inside shopping malls, viability goes up further. Monthly reach is 25m and 15.1m for National CineMedia and Screenvision, respectively (Source: Nielsen Media Impact, Sept 2017).
Walmart’s WMX and Kroger’s ClickList Ad Platforms
You’re on Kroger’s ClickList website, or walmart.com searching for cereal, and a sponsored ad shows up for something you’ve bought in the past with a deal if you buy two. Recency doesn’t get any more recent, and advertising here should be a no-brainer for brands selling, or thinking of selling, in either store.
Why is this media buy “unexpected?” Amazon’s AMS/AMG are so well known at this point; I want to call out Walmart’s WMX and Kroger’s ClickList, newer platforms that have the same kind of advertising options (or will). Various news outlets have reported that Kroger is selling ad units and developing a programmatic platform. WMX, by contrast, came around just after AMS and AMG.
There is sure to be a lot of upside for brands that get in early and develop relationships with these platforms, invest, and learn how to take advantage of them early. Hint for media and advertising agencies: if you can help brands do this, you’ll win. The substantial growth brands have seen on Amazon, and the cottage industry of agencies and media companies developing Amazon-specific service offerings is a clear sign the same is sure to happen for WMX and Kroger.
A significant player in the space, Walmart’s WMX sees a unique monthly reach of 103.3m thanks to Walmart.com traffic (Source: comScore, Feb 2018). Kroger's reach data is not yet available.
GSTV
Self-promotion alert, but here’s why it matters. GSTV is the new name for Gas Station TV, a data-driven, national video network delivering targeted audiences at scale across tens of thousands of fuel retailers (BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Exxon-Mobil, Kwik Trip, Speedway and more). This format reaches one in three Americans monthly, and know from research that people who are fueling up are very often on their way to buy something else. I could go on, but know there are plenty more reasons to consider GSTV.
All of these businesses have access to best-in-class third-party data resources. They offer all the trappings of du jour digital offerings, without the risk that an off the cuff remark from a celebrity will send stock prices plunging.
And, most importantly, they reach consumers at natural times when a purchase is a likely outcome, times when audiences are potentially in a buying mindset. While there are plenty of media formats disrupting consumers at all other times of day, doesn’t it make sense to reconsider the options that aren’t as disruptive?
Thoughtful application of these unique media offerings could mean a big difference for brands who leverage them appropriately. And in a marketplace rife with fraud, brand safety, and so many other issues, it pays to have tools like these at your disposal.
Sean McCaffrey, is chief executive officer at GSTV
MediaPost: PlaceIQ Launches LandMark Location-Data Offering
PlaceIQ, an ad-tech company focused on location data, announced on Wednesday the official release of its LandMark data offering.
LandMark offers access to PlaceIQ’s audience, behavior and visitation data, informing marketing decisions across platforms and industries.
PlaceIQ’s dataset is built through the understanding of billions of location-enabled device movements on a daily basis.
Clients using LandMark gain additional understanding of the real-world customer journey that can inform a host of marketing decisions, including media activation, cross-channel strategy, competitive positioning, retail site selection optimization and financial investments.
“PlaceIQ has always been passionate that the ultimate end goal for location data should be to allow brands to understand consumers in new ways,” Duncan McCall, the company’s CEO and co-founder, told Real-Time Daily via email. “LandMark is the culmination of that vision and something we’ve been building and refining since we started the company.”
“It’s a dynamic offering that allows you to answer questions about what’s happening in the marketplace, like what share-of-visit for a brand looks like, how overall visitation is ebbing and flowing, and how brand health can be measured market-to-market,” stated Kelly Lundquist, manager, data strategy, Havas Media.
Other companies that used Landmark for successful client engagements include Gas Station TV and The Media Kitchen.
Philip Rosenstein, MediaPost
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
Benzinga: Keeping You Informed and Entertained At The Pump: GSTV, Verifone Join Forces
Detroit’s own Gas Station TV — which reaches one-third of American adults at the pump each month — announced a joint venture with VeriFone Systems Inc Wednesday.
Gas Station TV started 11 years ago with the concept of bringing television content and advertising to the gas pump. The now-ubiquitous TVs are present at roughly 10-12 percent of the nation’s estimated 100,000 gas stations.
After combining its network with Verifone, Gas Station TV will reach more eyes in the “premium millennial” demographic this year than Snap Inc has forecast for its platform, said President and CEO David Leider.
“It just seemed like it was a good idea for us to come together,” Leider said of Verifone during an interview with Benzinga at his downtown Detroit office. Gas Station TV’s nationwide infrastructure and Verifone’s Pump Media division are now a single platform, Leider said, and the companies’ respective sales forces and content have been merged. The financial terms of the joint venture were not disclosed.
The partnership is a powerful one, said Joe Mach, president of San Jose, California-based Verifone.
“Under the GSTV umbrella and with Verifone’s influential backing, we will draw on our collective partnerships and experiences to strategically accelerate growth, push the boundaries of technology and deliver the proven effectiveness of video at the pump,” Mach said in a statement.
The Changing World Of TV Ads
DVRs and Netflix, Inc. are two reasons why engagement with traditional TV ads has declined, Leider said.
That isn’t the trend at Gas Station TV.
“Our ratings go up everyday,” Leider said. “Everyday we are installing televisions at gas stations. Everyday. So when [traditional media companies] are going down, we’re going up.”
Gas Station TV’s programming comes from nameplates such as ESPN, CNN, AccuWeather and The List.
Gas Station TV was founded in suburban Birmingham, Michigan in 2006, and now has 110 employees and offices across the country. It’s owned by Rockbridge Growth Equity, a firm cofounded by Quicken Loans Chairman Dan Gilbert, and Falcon Investment Advisors.
While the business has matured, Gas Station TV retains a startup mentality, Leider said: “We have a small business mentality that every dollar matters.”
As the company has grown, so has its ability to target consumers and provide clients with detailed analysis of their return on investment, Leider said.
Gas Station TV and its advertisers both employ geofencing — using signals from consumers’ smartphones — to track the impact of the ads consumers view while gassing up. The data points are anonymous and don’t identify consumers, Leider said.
The data can illustrate the follow-through of, for example, someone viewing a McDonald’s Corporation ad at a Gas Station TV-equipped pump and then visiting a nearby Golden Arches afterward.
Quick service restaurants have found success advertising with Gas Station TV, Leider said, because 70 percent of the sector’s business comes from drive-through customers — and every Gas Station TV viewer has a car.
In the same vein, Gas Station TV is the largest automotive video network worldwide and carries substantial automotive advertising, Leider said.
“I deliver three times more drivers than all [automotive websites] combined.”
Gas Station TV ads can be nationwide or targeted to as small of an audience as one specific station, Leider said. The company maintains detailed demographics for each gas station it’s partnered with and uses market research from services such as Nielsen Consumer Insights.
Gas station customers spend an average of 4 1/2 minutes at the pump, Leider said.
Not all of Gas Station TV’s clients are obvious ones. Amazon.com, Inc., for example, runs employee recruitment ads with the company. The rationale: the viewers of the ad generally live nearby and have a car, making Gas Station TV valuable from a recruitment perspective, Leider said.
Motor City Roots
Gas Station TV has been headquartered since 2015 in the renovated Kresge Building, which dates to 1917, on Woodward Avenue in downtown Detroit.
The company’s relationship with the city could be partially explained by Leider’s upbringing. His parents were raised in Detroit and often took Leider, 51, to visit when he was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s — decades when crime, blight and population loss were the city’s dominant narrative.
“My parents never treated the city as a place to avoid,” Leider said.
In the time since Gas Station TV moved downtown from suburban Birmingham, Nike Inc, eyewear brand Warby Parker and clothing retailer Kit and Ace have all opened within a block of the Kresge Building.
Under Armour Inc’s first Detroit location was opening its doors nine floors beneath Leider’s feet on Wednesday.
“We totally love to be part of this,” Leider said of the city’s ongoing renaissance. “It’s very natural.”
Out-of-state clients often assume Gas Station TV is headquartered in New York City, Leider said. Once they see the company’s address, “it [becomes] a whole conversation about Detroit.”
Dustin Blitchok, BENZINGA