Although retail media networks haven’t quite taken off in the convenience store industry, hundreds of operators joined Tuesday’s session at the 2023 NACS Show on the topic, eager to learn the fundamentals of running one of these programs.
Retail media spend, which hit about $40 billion in 2022, is set to surpass $100 billion by 2027, Art Sebastian, who formerly led Casey’s General Stores’ digital transformation, said during the session, citing 2023 data from eMarketer.
“My call out to the convenience industry is, you may want to figure out how to participate in this,” Sebastian said.
7-Eleven is among the few c-store retailers in the retail media game. The company debuted its platform, Gulp Media, less than a year ago, and has already learned several lessons on how to optimize the program and its CPG brand partnerships, Ben Tienor, 7-Eleven’s director of brand and customer insights, as well as the director of Gulp Media, said during the session.
Tienor and Sebastian also spoke alongside Mandee Harvey-Smith, director of analytics, insights and media strategy for RaceTrac, which is in the discussion stages of a potential retail media network, Harvey-Smith noted.
7-Eleven has learned that it’s best to think of CPG partners as customers, Tienor said. He noted that, as with working with customers in stores, there’s a value exchange happening. In this case, 7-Eleven is looking to help solve its CPG partners’ problems, and enable smarter, more useful targeting or measurement for them.
Tienor added that his team at Gulp Media often asks, “do our partners want it?” when configuring its roadmap and adding new channels and features.
“Trying to build technologies or capabilities that make their lives a little easier or a little more profitable is the point of that relationship,” he said.
Tienor has also learned more about running and staffing a retail media team over the past year. He noted that when getting started, c-store operators must consider how much they want to leverage a third party, adding that the Gulp Media team “is very outsourced at the moment,” with its agency partner doing the selling and media planning execution.
When 7-Eleven created Gulp Media last year, the company said in an interview at the time that it formed the team from within its marketing department, tapping those “with a wide breadth of experiences.”
Tienor said that if he could start over, he would outsource most aspects of the retail media platform and only keep functions of the CPG partnerships in-house. This approach would offer retailers the expertise of their third party while getting the program off the ground. Over time, as the program builds, more in-house team members can come aboard, he noted.
“It’s often easier to say yes to dollars than to yes to chairs,” he said.
Moving forward, 7-Eleven is exploring ways to use artificial intelligence in its retail media platform. Specifically, it wants to use generative AI to create more versions of advertising spots, whether visual or audio, instead of having to rewrite the scripts themselves, he noted.
“We think AI is a way to open up that content aperture that you need if you want to segment down to a somewhat micro level,” Tienor said.
