# S2 E5 Qsic _ 7-Eleven _ Media Ads & Commerce

S2 E5 Qsic / 7-Eleven / Media Ads & Commerce 

[00:00:00] Elgato Wave Neo-24: welcome to the middlemen. I'm Tom Limongello, and I'm here with Todd Sawicki. We, as middlemen, live at the intersection of media and e commerce, and we would like for you to join us in our discussions where we turn that chaotic intersection into your comfort zone  

[00:00:16]  

[00:00:18] Tom: Welcome to the middlemen. This is an interesting and different format. This is the first time we're having a guest podcast within a podcast. I'm here with Mark Walken. He is the CMO of QSIC and he invited the middlemen to be in the middle. Listen to a really interesting discussion with the head of retail media for, 7-Eleven mario, what's Mario's last name? 

[00:00:43] Tom: butcher  

[00:00:44] Marc Walkin: name. Re 

[00:00:46] Tom: Okay. Mario Mijares and the premier analyst for retail media. Andrew Lipsman was also in the podcast we're here at Shop Talk in the podcast lounge. So we wanted to give you a little bit of intro and understand what we're about to [00:01:00] hear. 

[00:01:00] Tom: If you've listened to the middlemen so far, you've heard a lot about either tier one retailers, Walmart, Amazon, or you've heard probably even more about, tier one to two grocery retailers, but what we haven't heard is a story around, c-store.  

[00:01:15] Marc Walkin: Yeah, and it really is an incremental channel to the conversation. And I think it also speaks to a lot, a broader topic of how can we, these RMNs really differentiate themselves, right? And in store the whole thing, because convenience, right? 

[00:01:29] Marc Walkin: It's less about less, it's less digital inventory and it's primarily in store driven. So it's an interesting opportunity 

[00:01:35] Tom: What I came back with was, imagine this world where you can target Gen Z and guess what, they also don't have their headphones on, and we can trial new products with them. 

[00:01:49] Tom: And it sounded pretty magical, I have to say.  

[00:01:51] Marc Walkin: Yeah. And one of the soap boxes I've been on lately is, we're talking so much about the who and the where, but, we'll, no, we're not talking enough about the [00:02:00] how. There's very, to me, minimal creativity. In this business and minimal differentiation. 

[00:02:06] Marc Walkin: And what the C-store channel offers is they're mostly impulse driven. That means you can't do some things, but it forces you to do other things. And it really creates this kind of incremental layer for the mix of options for brands. 

[00:02:18] Marc Walkin: Very interesting. 

[00:02:19] Tom: For me it's very exciting to hear. Different types of retail formats tell their story. Especially now that retail media is a thing that people are waiting to hear. What is the strategy? It's not just, do you have it, it's the press releases used to be, oh, that we're doing offsite or we're doing on site now. 

[00:02:37] Tom: It's okay, why do I don't I need to invest in, in C-store? And I think you, you started to talk about it a little bit. It's a very in-store opportunity. You'll hear Andrew talk about. How the attribution is similar to club where attribution is a hundred percent. Not just that they walked in the door, it's that the screens are pretty much viewable from [00:03:00] any part of the store. 

[00:03:00] Marc Walkin: Yep. And they're ready to buy. They're impulse driven,  

[00:03:03] Tom: and that's been the challenge has been the digital retail media has basically. Killed Impulse 

[00:03:09] Tom: Yes. 

[00:03:10] Tom: Online shopping with product, listing ads you're going in and you're searching keywords. 

[00:03:14] Tom: You're not searching for M&Ms. You're supposed to run into those at the cash register. If C-store can prove out impulse, that alone should be enough for a brand to want to invest. 

[00:03:24] Marc Walkin: invest. Absolutely. And we gloss over sometimes is the massive scale and massive reach of C stores. 

[00:03:30] Marc Walkin: And 7-Eleven in particular, they have 250 million transactions a month. I think Mario mentioned it's 200,000 an hour. It's unparalleled. And when you fact over when it's Gen Z without headphones ready to make an unplanned purchase, and basically a hundred percent audible or visual environment. 

[00:03:48] Marc Walkin: It's really one of the more interesting and. Valuable ad channels today, period. 

[00:03:54] Tom: Let's give it a listen.  

[00:03:55] Marc Walkin: All right. We are here at the podcast studio at Shop [00:04:00] Talk and by we by the way me, I'm Mark. I'm head of marketing for QSIC with Matt Elsley co-founder and CEO. Andrew Lipsman needs no introduction.  

[00:04:09] Marc Walkin: Media  

[00:04:09] Andrew Lipsman: Media  

[00:04:10] Marc Walkin: Media  

[00:04:10] Andrew Lipsman: Ads and Commerce Independent Analyst. Hello. Good to be here. 

[00:04:13] Marc Walkin: and our retail expert extraordinaire, Mario plus 

[00:04:18] Mario Miljares: Mario, from 7-Eleven. 

[00:04:20] Marc Walkin: And so it's a very timely discussion. A because Andrew just released a a really interesting piece around C stores and retail media, and really is now the moment and what makes C-store quite unique relative to their broader retail media market. Maybe, Andrew, I'll, I'd kick it to you why is it just getting its sort of moment in the sun now? 

[00:04:44] Marc Walkin: What 

[00:04:44] Andrew Lipsman: Yeah. I think in-store retail media broadly is just starting to pick up the pace, right? There's, it's finally this awareness and a understanding amongst retailers that it's time to make this happen. 

[00:04:57] Andrew Lipsman: Even if the ad dollars aren't here [00:05:00] yet, but we can finally see a trajectory. C stores I think, have a lot of the same value proposition that I've talked about with respect to large retailers and grocers, which is scale, brand safety great place for endemic and even non-endemic brands. 

[00:05:14] Andrew Lipsman: Really a lot of what brands have historically looked for out of TV only now you get that same quality close to the point of sale. C-store specifically though I think are unique in that the small format store just works better from an advertising standpoint. I think there's a lot more leverage on every individual impression because there's a greater ability to be seen or if it's audio, that you're getting full reach within the store. 

[00:05:44] Andrew Lipsman: So I think that assumption of reach isn't just somebody walks in the door. If it's a grocery store, they may or may not see the ad. I think the probability that anybody is exposed once they walk in the doors of a C-store is extremely high. And it's impulse, impulse [00:06:00] items, single serve higher margin, like this is very important to CPG brands. 

[00:06:05] Andrew Lipsman: And so I think that when you tend to think of large retailers first, you can easily overlook where maybe the best leverage is on a per impression basis. 

[00:06:16] Marc Walkin: That makes a lot of sense. It's the perfect format for, certainly for in-store retail media. 

[00:06:21] Marc Walkin: Mario you live and breathe this every day. What would you add here? 

[00:06:25] Mario Miljares: Oh, I'd say that it, everybody started, or retail media really started with. Like really big players like Amazon and Walmart, right? And it started all with advertising on first party properties, right? Pretty much on the websites, right? Then it moved to mass retailers, grocers, et cetera, et cetera. 

[00:06:45] Mario Miljares: Convenience stores don't necessarily have very large first party properties, but what they have, as Andrew said, is the traffic in the store. So there's a, from our point of view. Retail media in the convenience store [00:07:00] has three of the things that are magical for all the CPGs we are the stomping grounds from Gen Z. 

[00:07:11] Mario Miljares: They really don't have a warehouse club membership. I'm not gonna name everybody, anybody in particular, but they just don't, right? They don't also have a big online retailer membership either, right? They shop at the convenience store. Two. As you said, these are impulse purchases. And it's a small footprint. 

[00:07:29] Mario Miljares: You can influence the consumer at the point of purchase before they make a choice. Wow. And the holy grail. So the audience you want, which is very hard to get influencing the consumer at the point of purchase in three full attribution. 'cause we know exactly who was in the store and we can tell you if it works. 

[00:07:48] Mario Miljares: Or not. I think those three things for the people that are starting to go on that journey with 7-Eleven Gulp Media, which is our retail media play, they're seeing that as [00:08:00] long as they're open to test new things, because this is a new frontier, they're seeing fantastic returns on their investment. 

[00:08:07] Marc Walkin: Yeah, no, that, that makes a lot of sense. And I would add, I think the fourth big one, in my opinion, certainly from a CPG standpoint, one of the. 

[00:08:15] Marc Walkin: Areas where I think retail media is struggling a little bit beyond the, those sort of big three retailers just scale and reach, right? Where, once you move on from your Walmarts and your targets and those mass retailers of the world, it's hard to actually get the scale that you need that warrants the dollars and warrants even the attention from the CPGs and, 7-Eleven in particular, right? 

[00:08:35] Marc Walkin: 250 million visitors 

[00:08:37] Mario Mijares: Yeah. We have about 250 million visitors per month. It works out to about 200,000 customers per hour without counting gas. And outside our doors, our reach is we have over a hundred million registered loyalty members, if 7-Eleven were a public company, we'd be a Fortune [00:09:00] 50. 

[00:09:00] Marc Walkin: yeah. Yeah. And on that note, so on the on, on the data standpoint. 

[00:09:05] Marc Walkin: And loyalty standpoint. How, and this is for the group. How would we think about actioning that data and leveraging that data to, to improve, the offering itself? How are we doing it for C-store? And then also how does that, how might that differ from your kind of more mass channel retailers? Do 

[00:09:26] Mario Miljares: want me to jump in or, yeah, 

[00:09:27] Andrew Lipsman: I think the first party data foundation is the key to any strong retail media network. And what I think is particularly interesting or how I might think about leveraging. That data is once somebody's in the store there's a lot of innovation SKUs, right? 

[00:09:44] Andrew Lipsman: This is where people try new products, new brands. Speaking of myself personally, like I, every time I go in and grab a drink, I kind of wanna try one that I've never tried before. So I think you're very impressionable there. But the benefit then with innovation SKUs is the [00:10:00] ability, to leverage that data to retarget on multiple channels after the fact and reinforce that brand and maybe try and turn somebody from a new to brand consumer into a loyal consumer. 

[00:10:11] Andrew Lipsman: So I just think there's a lot of interesting and unique things that, that you can do with that. And then obviously also take it from single serve to in, driving purchase of maybe a 12 pack of soda or whatever the case may be. 

[00:10:27] Marc Walkin: it's, yeah. 

[00:10:28] Mario Miljares: So from our point of view, that's exactly right. Convenience is a natural place for new product introduction. Because it's a low commitment purchase, you only need to buy one. 

[00:10:37] Matt Elsley: one.  

[00:10:38] Mario Miljares: The way we go to market is not only through Gulp Media, we go to market with what we call the immediate consumption ecosystem, which is we're trying to position 7-Eleven as the fastest, cheapest, easiest, less risky place to innovate. 

[00:10:53] Mario Miljares: We give our vendors access to all our transactional loyalty data where they can find opportunities. We [00:11:00] have a proprietary consumer panel called the Brain Freeze Collective, which. We have over 300,000 customers that have signed up for it all mapped to the database. We are testing something called the lab store. 

[00:11:13] Mario Miljares: It's a store with a lot of cameras in it where we can run an, run, an experiment. The customer does not know we're running an experiment there. And then from a retail media side we've focused on outside our four doors with programmatic, social, and connected tv. Inside the store, it's the screen at the pump, which you need to listen to. 

[00:11:35] Mario Miljares: You need to look at it when you pay for gas inside the store. Mario Mijares 

[00:11:40] Mario Miljares: We believe the best media is audio because most people come into the store, jump out of their car, so they're not wearing headphones. Your ears are always on. We need to influence the consumer very quickly. So one of the things that we're, Matt, you should jump in 'cause it's your platform, [00:12:00] but one of the things why we're excited about the QC platform is that ability to take all the things that marketers are used to doing with digital ads A/B testing, day, partying, et cetera, et cetera, full attribution. 

[00:12:16] Mario Miljares: And doing them in the store. Like all of our creative for all of our ads is. Built through AI from text to voice, that allows us to do a lot of concept testing, a lot of optimization of those ads. 

[00:12:30] Matt Elsley: Yeah. 

[00:12:30] Matt Elsley: But it, it is the right environment 

[00:12:32] Matt Elsley: To get this technology to really thrive and make sense to the rest of 

[00:12:37] Matt Elsley: the market because. It is immediate consumption, like you pointed out. It's largely emotional driven decision making. We're talking to the customer through audio 

[00:12:47] Matt Elsley: Music is highly, 

[00:12:48] Matt Elsley: emotive, 

[00:12:49] Matt Elsley: very easy to grab attention, but the structure of the. 

[00:12:53] Matt Elsley: ad, like we talked about earlier today, 

[00:12:54] Matt Elsley: the Structure 

[00:12:55] Matt Elsley: of the ad really makes a difference. 

[00:12:56] Matt Elsley: This 

[00:12:56] Matt Elsley: is where Lucy can really come into effect of learning of [00:13:00] what creative is working well. 

[00:13:01] Matt Elsley: One of the really interesting things that we found through audio is that closer 

[00:13:04] Matt Elsley: to the  

[00:13:05] Matt Elsley: beginning of the ad that has the key message. 

[00:13:08] Matt Elsley: The better the performance of the ad. 

[00:13:10] Matt Elsley: So like you talked about earlier today,  

[00:13:12] Matt Elsley: it is not an opportunity to tell a story.  

[00:13:15] Matt Elsley: It's an opportunity.  

[00:13:16] Matt Elsley: to get a core message at the 

[00:13:17] Matt Elsley: right time right before the purchase actually occurs. and that's 

[00:13:21] Matt Elsley: where audio can do that incredibly well 'cause we can reach anyone in the store where like, you don't have to look at us like that cocktail effect of like 

[00:13:29] Matt Elsley: grabbing attention, deliver the message and then have  

[00:13:32] Matt Elsley: a little out and then it. It's incredibly powerful when you do it well, but you need the  

[00:13:37] Matt Elsley: right toolkit to analyze these things. to see it in the transactional data, to play with the creative to dial it in. And the bigger the scale, the easier these nuances are to detect, 

[00:13:47] Matt Elsley: which is right. From our perspective, convenience is a very powerful network to, to start. 

[00:13:54] Matt Elsley: Yeah. 

[00:13:54] Mario Miljares: When we were starting, we had this very large energy drink company and said, okay, we want to test radio. They [00:14:00] came in with their 30 second ad. We wanna do this ad. We know this one works. I'm like, you know what? It's not gonna work in a convenience store. It's too long. You don't have time for storytelling. 

[00:14:09] Mario Miljares: No. We're sure this is gonna work. With their permission, we chop the we did a shorter version, I think it was seven, eight seconds and we. We had three sets of stores, one with a seven second ad, one with a 30 second ad and a control store. And by far, as you said, Matt, the seven second ad that just close the sale, deliver the message. 

[00:14:28] Mario Miljares: That worked a lot better than the other one. 

[00:14:30] Andrew Lipsman: The me the medium is the message. It's always been true. I think we always see this when there's the emergence of a new medium that we try and take whatever was last and import it, and it doesn't work that well. You have to leverage what's unique about that medium. And in this case the cstore is a medium. 

[00:14:48] Andrew Lipsman: It's visual. I think people are especially receptive to engaging eye catching content with video. Also, it's great for in-store audio. I think this is the perfect venue to [00:15:00] do both, right? This is I think I'd love to see the data behind it, but a one plus one equals three scenario. When you layer on that effective audio messaging on top of high impact creative, I feel like that's gotta move product. 

[00:15:14] Marc Walkin: And I think that small format stores are a great use case for this, but in retail media as a whole, I think we talk so much about the who we're targeting and the where, but we really don't talk enough about the how and focus on the creative component, where it. To, to your point, Mario and Andrew. 

[00:15:30] Marc Walkin: A medium is the message, right? What might work in one channel is completely different in another, right? Especially because convenience is so impulse driven. So you need to accommodate the creative to to be effective in, in that channel where it may not be somewhere else.  

[00:15:44] Mario Miljares: Can we Yeah, go ahead. Can we talk about something you've said before? Sure. 'cause it's actually a really important point. Convenience is a natural place for product introduction. That's really important because when some of the less sophisticated companies that we work with [00:16:00] look at the results and convenience and they think if I invested the same amount of money on these big, large other retail media, I would get a better return on investment. 

[00:16:11] Mario Miljares: Is that Maybe, but two things. One, look at the job that you're trying to do in the convenience store, right? If you make your, let's say that you're introducing a root beer, flavored energy drink, right? You're not gonna introduce it as a 20 pack at Costco or at a warehouse club. You're not gonna introduce it as six pack in a grocery store. 

[00:16:32] Mario Miljares: You're gonna introduce it in 7-Eleven. If you make that product as success, then you take it everywhere, right? So you also need to go into convenience store thinking. Part of the return on investment is how many of the products I introduce in the convenience store using the channel and the message and all the things we've been talking about. 

[00:16:55] Mario Miljares: Can I make successful? Because the payout is gonna be [00:17:00] initially the convenience store, but the payout is your brand is gonna have a much wider footprint outside 

[00:17:05] Andrew Lipsman: outside 

[00:17:05] Mario Miljares: of the convenience store. 

[00:17:06] Marc Walkin: It's ultimately an influencer channel, right? I mean that really is a, it's a great way to set you a, just because of the Gen Z component as a whole, but it's a great way to trial a new product and to Yes, influence the distribution and expansion strategy, obviously well beyond the channel. 

[00:17:21] Marc Walkin: So that's a really good point. 

[00:17:23] Andrew Lipsman: yeah. I'm thinking about it in the context of CPG brands. They are often adherent to how brands grow and that's based on the principles of reach, mental availability, physical availability. In my head, I'm checking the boxes in all three in this channel. And especially. The new to brand component, right? 

[00:17:40] Andrew Lipsman: It's inherently driving that new to brand that helps brands grow and especially the, there's a lot of leverage on it that you can introduce it at a small scale, but ultimately it pays off in a much bigger scale. Where that growth really comes from where, for a CPG brand to be able to go from 1% growth to [00:18:00] 3% growth for your brand from year to year is huge. 

[00:18:04] Marc Walkin: Yeah. When you take a step, several steps back and look at the macro landscape. 

[00:18:09] Marc Walkin: Of, and when we see the long tail of retail media networks, it's not, a lot of them aren't catching, again, beyond those big three. And the big reason is what is the, what is their purpose, right? What, how are they different? Different for the CPG? Why would A CPG invest in one network over another? 

[00:18:24] Marc Walkin: And I think what we're talking about here is we've really illustrated that, right? If you want to launch a new product, if you want either appeal to Gen Z, if you need your dollars to work. Extra hard when you need to focus, a lot more on conversion, right? Rather than, super top of funnel. 

[00:18:40] Marc Walkin: And we'll see what happens when sales trickle down that, that is, the convenient channel's kind of reason for being right. 

[00:18:47] Mario Miljares: It's partly that, but it's also you need to, in reality, we all shop at warehouse clubs. 

[00:18:55] Mario Miljares: We all shop at the mass merchant. We all shop at the grocery store, and we all shop [00:19:00] at convenience stores. But. The customer that is going at 7-Eleven and buying an energy drink every day, it's not going to the warehouse club and buying 20 packs, right? So you will never get the energy drink. 

[00:19:11] Mario Miljares: Company will never get that customer over there. So yes, there's a job in there for introducing new product, which is very important. But there's also, from a customer point of view, you need to focus on the mission of every single customer and the way you sell a. 20 pack of energy drinks at a warehouse club is very different from the way you sell an energy drink at a convenience store. 

[00:19:37] Mario Miljares: And going back, Matt, to what you said is one of the things that we can do now with radio, because the creative is quick and easy to do because it's all text to voice from AI, is we can start experimenting with the. The audio in the morning is different than at noon different than the afternoon and different than at 10:00 PM at night until we figure out what is the [00:20:00] right message to sell that energy drink to all those very different audiences with very different needs states. 

[00:20:07] Marc Walkin: Yeah. That's it. It's very, and that kind of goes back to the how of it all right. We thinking more about the ways that which you can break through, it's not just the same playbook. 

[00:20:18] Marc Walkin: Over and over again. One of the cool things I like that I think that we have the ability to do is, again, on that how is the real time component, right? So especially a convenience store, if there's a snowstorm, for example, coming, right? That if you're going with your traditional kind of ad planning, it's very hard for a brand to, plan for that or accommodate for that. 

[00:20:40] Marc Walkin: So with. With this platform, you can a, create an ad very quickly or have one in the can waiting and say, okay, there's a blizzard that's affecting these, 120 stores and in real time, effectively be able to, capitalize on that or if it's a cultural thing or whatever it is. So again, it goes into that creative, into the how which [00:21:00] is ultimately, for the most part going to drive performance more than the channel itself. 

[00:21:05] Marc Walkin: It's the ability to be able to. Do things differently, smarter and more 

[00:21:10] Andrew Lipsman: And we don't talk about contextual targeting nearly enough. We've spent so many years as a digital ad industry talking about personalization. I need to know every little bit of data about you to target some ads slightly better. I look for the, what the big variables are that determine what people do, and the big variables are the context in which they're in. 

[00:21:30] Andrew Lipsman: Just nine times outta 10, that's gonna be the most important one. Any store contextual factors should be a key piece of the equation. But especially in convenience. 

[00:21:39] Marc Walkin: Yeah. And you touched on the personalization and, that was really obviously started out of digital. 

[00:21:45] Marc Walkin: Why, and I know Andrew and, but we've had many conversations about this, but why do we think in store is just now getting to see people are beginning to come on board the overall market. What's. Held it back so far. And [00:22:00] where do we see it playing out? Andrew, this is right in 

[00:22:02] Andrew Lipsman: oh, it's organizational from both the brand and retailer side. It's refreshing to look at other parts of the world that don't have that aren't so entrenched in these organizational dynamics because. I think of Tesco as an example. Not only were they able to introduce in-store screens, but they went right to the digital, to the end cap, which I would think, from an organizational conflict standpoint here in the us, that would be one of the hardest places to introduce digital signage. 

[00:22:31] Andrew Lipsman: I, I think that that's the biggest impediment is organizational. Then there's obviously, and we say CX and CapEx one there's been a, an overriding concern that it will affect. The cx. I think that's probably just about a non-factor in convenience. You expect convenience to be bright, engaging. 

[00:22:49] Andrew Lipsman: And then the CapEx standpoint, that's always an issue. I know for audio, that's one of the huge benefits of audio and why audio is moving into stores much more quickly because you don't have [00:23:00] those CapEx concerns. But even still beyond that, I think. Screens are maybe not as cost prohibitive as they once were 

[00:23:09] Mario Miljares: prohibitive and part, partly it's also, I think it has to do with retail media started with very large retailers first. So if you take if you wanna make in-store media successful for the store that's the size of two football fields, as you say the CapEx is massive. The installation is hard. 

[00:23:26] Mario Miljares: And then the tracking, what do you show where it it's just, it's a massive enterprise, right? For us, audio is what we use in the store, right? If you tried audio in a store the size of two football fields, it would be, it would not have the same impact that audio has inside a convenience store, right? 

[00:23:48] Mario Miljares: So it's, you need to adapt. The channel to the store and the context and the mission. 

[00:23:57] Andrew Lipsman: in-store measurement also is not solved [00:24:00] yet. And I 

[00:24:01] Mario Miljares: We've solved it. 

[00:24:01] Andrew Lipsman: well. I think this is a big piece of it because I'm a big believer you don't let the perfect be the enemy of good in measurement. But it's a big assumption for most digital screens in a grocery store that somebody actually saw that screen,  

[00:24:16] Mario Miljares: the 

[00:24:16] Andrew Lipsman: likelihood that they pass by any individual screen may only be like 30%. It's a pretty reasonable assumption that a screen in a convenience store has been seen. It's a fair assumption that impression when somebody's in the store has been heard or at least meets the same opportunity to see standard that has traditionally been used in media measurement. 

[00:24:36] Andrew Lipsman: I think that, if you can't be perfect in measurement, being very close to perfect is pretty good. 

[00:24:41] Mario Miljares: Yeah. There's a, there's this notion of a discounted CPM which yeah, you're talking about how many people in the grocery store, in the mass merchant actually walked through this screen that was in the laundry aisle. I don't know. In the convenience store, pretty much everybody walks through where the [00:25:00] screens are, so there is a discounted CPM to the. 

[00:25:03] Mario Miljares: For the screens, depending on the context where there are for radio, there's no discounted CPM. 'cause as I said before, people drive to the store. They're not wearing headphones when they come in. Everybody's listening to those ads. 

[00:25:17] Marc Walkin: And one of the, I wouldn't call it a misconception because now it's been solved, but one of the kind of hurdles to d is I used to buy in store audio all the time, 10, 15 years ago when I was on the brand side. 

[00:25:28] Marc Walkin: And I'm like, are, can anyone even hear this? Is this, is it reaching the right people? Is it clear? And one of the interesting things that we've collectively been able to do is, having those sensors that adjust the volume based on the noise in the store, if the store's really loud right. 

[00:25:44] Marc Walkin: It's gonna be hard. It's just naturally, obviously harder to hear. And certainly if there's something where their volume's too soft it's gonna be hard to hear. And there's, I think, a little bit of uncertainty from brands historically of, we don't actually know if these things are being played. 

[00:25:57] Marc Walkin: We don't actually know if they're being heard. And that's one of [00:26:00] the things that is, that has been solved for, so you're, you're the guarantee of play, right? Proof of play and the how and the effectiveness  

[00:26:08] Matt Elsley: I, can talk to the, the technicalities of that from a platform perspective 'cause that is a solved problem, particularly  

[00:26:13] Matt Elsley: in  

[00:26:13] Marc Walkin: 7-Eleven. 

[00:26:14] Matt Elsley: 7-Eleven , We have a product called AVA, autonomous Volume Adjustment, 

[00:26:17] Matt Elsley: which is a decibel reader tracks those ambient noise, levels and then it does dynamically 

[00:26:22] Matt Elsley: adjust  

[00:26:22] Matt Elsley: the, the volume. 

[00:26:23] Matt Elsley: of each speaker. Because if it, 

[00:26:24] Matt Elsley: if You can't hear the 

[00:26:25] Matt Elsley: Audio then  

[00:26:26] Matt Elsley: it's definitely  

[00:26:26] Matt Elsley: not having any impact. 

[00:26:27] Matt Elsley: And Particularly 

[00:26:28] Matt Elsley: when you're in a fast 

[00:26:28] Matt Elsley: paced environment, you know the 

[00:26:30] Matt Elsley: fluctuations 

[00:26:31] Matt Elsley: of people coming in and outta the stores 

[00:26:33] Matt Elsley: be Very 

[00:26:33] Matt Elsley: rapid. So when there's a lot of people in the stores 

[00:26:35] Matt Elsley: and lunchtime might hit and then it's packed, if the audio is not adjusting, then you know you're not gonna have Any impact. Similarly, 

[00:26:43] Matt Elsley: like at night, you don't want the volume too loud because it's very quiet. 

[00:26:47] Matt Elsley: and then you're gonna 

[00:26:48] Matt Elsley: be bugging staff, You're gonna be giving people a bad experience by  

[00:26:51] Matt Elsley: drilling into them.  

[00:26:53] Matt Elsley: Um,  

[00:26:54] Matt Elsley: And this is why, 

[00:26:55] Matt Elsley: you. 

[00:26:55] Matt Elsley: We use IP based speakers 

[00:26:57] Matt Elsley: So Mario's 

[00:26:57] Matt Elsley: fully deployed , POE [00:27:00] speakers right the way through his network because they're internet enabled they're connected to the internet, so we know exactly what they're doing. 

[00:27:06] Matt Elsley: But more importantly, it's every ad plays 

[00:27:08] Matt Elsley: time and date stamped with the volume 

[00:27:10] Matt Elsley: recorded 

[00:27:11] Matt Elsley: and 'cause it's the media, 

[00:27:13] Matt Elsley: player, the amplifier, and the speaker all in one unit.  

[00:27:16] Matt Elsley: We know Definitively. 

[00:27:18] Matt Elsley: that that ad got played into that, space, at that volume, at that day. 

[00:27:22] Mario Miljares: And with the loyalty data, we know who was at the store at that point, at that time, and that's how we can close the loop. If 

[00:27:29] Mario Miljares: that's what we're saying, it solved 

[00:27:30] Marc Walkin: right? Yeah. Yeah. It's great. It's exciting. So we have a couple minutes left. I wanted to, just to leave it with thinking ahead, we've talked a lot about the past in the present, but where do we think.  

[00:27:41] Andrew Lipsman: I  

[00:27:42] Marc Walkin: retail media specifically within the convenience channel. If we fast forward three to five years, certainly with, with AI and all of these new capabilities and even organizational evolution, where do we see this going? 

[00:27:54] Marc Walkin: In the ne what does it look like in the next three to five years? When you're thinking about it from an offering standpoint for [00:28:00] brands, what will it, what will be different?  

[00:28:02] Mario Miljares: It's Yogi Berra said it's hard to make predictions especially about the future, but of course, there's gonna be a lot more penetration of it. But two things that I think are gonna be, we're gonna have a lot more non endemics investing in retail media in the convenience store because customers can be influenced, maybe not necessarily. 

[00:28:21] Mario Miljares: For a purchase there then, but later on, so for example, we sell shampoo detergent windshield wiper fluid, right? Right now we're not focusing on those manufacturers, but in a couple of years I think that'll change. The other one is we play music between the ads or ads between the music. I think there is a place also for, when you go into convenience store, you are not in control of what music you listen to, right? I'm gonna give you a hypothetical. Let's say that there's a company that is gonna put on a concert for a pick your favorite eighties [00:29:00] boys band in your local city, and suddenly new kids on the block. And suddenly you start going into 7-Eleven solid pick, start going seven, 11, and a couple of months before the concert. 

[00:29:11] Mario Miljares: Hey, it, there's a lot of new kids on the block played in the in store radio and that may drive tickets up. So there's it, what I'm trying to say, it may not only be the products we sell in the store, but it will have a much, much wider influence because of the frequency with which customers visit the convenience store. 

[00:29:31] Marc Walkin: Great. Andrew, do you have anything to add 

[00:29:33] Andrew Lipsman: Yeah. When I look to the future, I think about  

[00:29:37] Andrew Lipsman: the  

[00:29:37] Andrew Lipsman: fact that the market's gonna be dictated by the brands and their willingness to spend the, you gotta start there. And what I hear with brands with respect to in-store retail media broadly, is they need scale. They need measurement. And I think that per c-store, one of the things that I would lean into [00:30:00] in the near term at least, is better measurement. 

[00:30:02] Andrew Lipsman: We can give, we can actually give you a much clearer picture of your incremental return on ad spend that you're not gonna be able to get from other channels. So maybe that helps facilitate the investment than the next thing. The next box, that box that needs to be checked is scale. And that's where c-store, individual C-store can, can struggle, right? 

[00:30:21] Andrew Lipsman: 7-Eleven is truly the exception here. Which is why I think ultimately the rest of the market has to look towards aggregation. So the article I wrote was, convenience as a Media Channel. It's really as a collected media channel. It's truly national. It has incredible scale. 

[00:30:36] Andrew Lipsman: And if it can check the boxes on measurement and ask any CPG, by the way, they will tell you. Why they like convenience. It's the margins, it's the incremental purchase. So they don't need a lot of convincing there. They just need to meet those base level criteria that makes it easy enough to invest. 

[00:30:52] Andrew Lipsman: May, maybe this is what will ultimately serve as the springboard to larger investments in-store retail media.  

[00:30:59] Matt Elsley: [00:31:00] I think from  

[00:31:00] Matt Elsley: my point of view, I think it's more of the near term of I definitely agree we've gotta get everyone on the same page. 

[00:31:06] Matt Elsley: From a measurement point of view Mario's definitely right. We've gone a very long way to solve this in very data driven and and. 

[00:31:12] Matt Elsley: and standardized way that as long as we bring the CPGs on that journey and get them comfortable and get  

[00:31:19] Matt Elsley: them to understand.  

[00:31:20] Matt Elsley: the calculations that we are  

[00:31:21] Matt Elsley: running, like it'll be highly successful. The other thing that I'm very excited by is the actual development of the creative side. 

[00:31:30] Matt Elsley: like for the brands themselves, like the kind of learnings that Seven elevens undertaking at the minute with products like Lucy, who's generating the ad content based on attributions 

[00:31:40] Matt Elsley: Is it male, is it female, is it happy, is it excited? and then the the underlying. 

[00:31:46] Matt Elsley: Elements of is there price, is there location is there promotion and building in all the variations into those scripts that get distributed across the whole network. Because all those inputs are now digitally assigned through [00:32:00] an intelligence layer,  

[00:32:01] Matt Elsley: they actually all become measurement elements on the backend as well. 

[00:32:05] Matt Elsley: So the understanding as we really start to scale this up from a brand perspective, 

[00:32:09] Matt Elsley: we're gonna know very, in a very detailed way 

[00:32:13] Matt Elsley: what, how to position. a under what context in what shopper journey, under what mission, at any given time of the day. And I think that is gonna be a huge unlock over the next couple of years, as we go through that journey. 

[00:32:25] Matt Elsley: But I think the brands themselves are gonna love to come and speak to the Gulp media guys about how does my  

[00:32:33] Matt Elsley: product resonate with these audiences? and when, and I don't think that kind of.  

[00:32:39] Matt Elsley: Learning has actually been undertaken in a physical environment with, with such rich data assets as well. And I think that's gonna be a very powerful component of our next journey. 

[00:32:49] Mario Miljares: one. One last thought. 'cause I know that you and I have talked about this. We definitely want to test this and I'm pretty sure it's gonna work if we start recording the ads with the [00:33:00] local accents. Southern drawl in Texas, maybe a Cuban accent in Miami a Boston accents over there. I'm pretty sure that will give us better results as well. 

[00:33:10] Marc Walkin: That's great. On that note, we'll we'll stop here, but thank you everybody. This was great. I think we covered all sorts of bases and, I think there was an, a collective, I think industry realization of how ripe C-Store is as an ad channel, but also even the last five minutes here of just how we've just scratched the surface of. 

[00:33:29] Marc Walkin: What could be, 

[00:33:30] Marc Walkin: can leave this with a final shout out? 

[00:33:32] Andrew Lipsman: I've gotta say I love the name Gulp Media Network and the Brain Freeze Collective. It sounds like a really cool band. Whoever named that deserves some sort of a prize or bonus. 

[00:33:43] Marc Walkin: and you have special  

[00:33:44] Andrew Lipsman: I'm partial to 7-Eleven 'cause it is my birthday  

[00:33:47]