The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

In the early years of digital signage networks - particularly those that were ad-based - operators would often describe how their medium was captive. The proposition was that people stuck doing something - usually waiting - would pass their time looking at a screen.

Then smartphones came along, and there went that notion. Except in places like gas stations, where people still needed to be somewhat focused on the task. A company called GSTV has been running a digital signage channel on the screens of fuel dispensers for almost two decades, and is deployed at more than 25,000 locations.

The company dominates its category, and the mix of programming on the pump screens has 100 million unique viewers.

The pitch to planners is far more sophisticated these days than the captive audience thing - something very obvious in this talk with CEO Sean McCaffrey, who gets into a lot of detail about the benefits for consumer brands and for the gas station and C-store operators who work with GSTV.

Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.

TRANSCRIPT

Sean, thank you for joining me. It's almost weird to think about, but your company and your medium is actually a pretty mature medium now. 

Sean McCaffrey: It is. I still look at it as very new. I've been with the business for five and a half years, and when I describe it to people at a backyard barbecue, and they ask what I do, I say: I run a six-year-old startup that happened and have a one-year proof of concept. So to your point, we've been around for 15+ years as a sector, if you will. 

For people who maybe don't live in the United States, describe what it is that goes on. 

Sean McCaffrey: Yeah, no problem. So GSTV  is a national digital video platform in 205 US markets. Out of 210, we reach about 50% percent of US adults every month, about 116m monthly unique viewers, and we connect with consumers three to five minutes at a time, three to five times a month when they're fueling up their vehicle. So think about it as a very habitual serialized engagement week in and week out when someone stops to fuel up as they're running errands on a road trip, on their way to the ballgame on a Saturday, that sort of thing, and we partner with the fuel and convenience retailers in the US to put in this amenity, provide information, entertainment, that sort of thing, and focus on building value for brands, agencies, retailers, and consumers, and we work with a variety of large chains, small chains middle market, kind of everything in between.

And the nut of it is you've got a screen embedded in the fuel dispenser. 

Sean McCaffrey: Correct. Our screens come embedded in the fuel equipment, which is a long-term hardware purchase decision for fuel retailers. The retailers get it as an amenity, and they get a small amount of promotional time within our show. There are shared economics amongst the parties obviously as well, and then we build a consumer experience that provides value to the retailers, value to consumers, and then brands and agencies can integrate in any number of ways. The way we look at it is we program a show every day. Every station is like an addressable household. The household has more family members, so we could have tens of thousands of different versions of the show on any given day, depending on what content and what advertising is running. 

Now, we don't go probably down to that level of customization just based on how brands use it. But think about urban, suburban, weekday, weekend, all those lake and beach communities, let's say all summer long, that is a very different population from Thursday to Sunday, let's say in July versus January. So lots of ways to customize the entertainment, content, commercials, advertising, and so on.

I have a bit of a past with this stuff going back to the early to mid 2000s when there was a Canadian company also looking at this, and at that time it was extraordinarily