Gas Station TV to roll out to stations in Wal-Mart parking lots

Gas Station TV will install screens at some 100 Murphy USA locations in the parking lots of Wal-Mart stores in Atlanta, Dallas and Houston in October, David Leider, GSTV’s chief executive officer told NPN MarketPulse in an interview. There will be 1,000 screens in operation in the three markets once the installations are complete, Leider said.

The company’s 20-inch LCD monitors will be installed atop Gilbarco Veeder-Root dispensers. “We contracted them for installation, service and maintenance,” Leider said of Gilbarco. “We bear the cost of the equipment and installation.”

With gas-station customers increasingly paying for transactions at the pump, fewer customers are visiting the convenience store, Leider said. Gas Station TV is designed to help drive customers back into the store.

Drivers average four to five minutes at the pump when refueling a vehicle, and as much as seven minutes for some large SUVs, according to Leider. He’s building a business on that fact. He calls those more-or-less idle minutes “dwell time.”

Leider figures the dwell time is more than enough for the GSTV network to present segments on entertainment, news, sports, traffic and weather – with advertising and a spot for whatever promotion the petroleum marketer is running in-store. The petroleum marketer gets to run its spot free, Leider said.

Each commercial stands alone, with national and local programming from ABC preceding and following it. This presentation is designed to maximize the impact of each advertisement, Leider said.

A pilot program that started this summer is running on more than 50 screens on dispensers at five gas stations in Dallas, Leider said.

Gas Station TV, based in Oak Park, Mich., has been fine-tuning the product, the programming and the advertising, Leider said. The devices feature a speaker system with directional audio designed to cut through ambient noise, and consumer feedback during the pilot was positive, Leider said.

The objective for next year will be to continue expanding so that the network spans the top 15 demographic markets in the United States, he said.

In related news, advertising playing on television screens in grocery stores has been found to sway consumer purchasing decisions, reports AdWeek.com.

According to a recent study by Nielsen Media Research, consumers “for the most part” enjoy watching the ads and can often be “swayed” by the ads they see before reaching checkout. According to the news report, the study examines in-store media provided by the Connecticut-based company SignStorey, which is featured in more than 1,300 grocery stores and six retail chains nationwide.

The study reveals that 68 percent of shoppers surveyed say that in-store messages would “sway their product purchasing decisions,” notes AdWeek,while another 44 percent say they would “swap a product they had intended to buy for one advertised on SignStorey.”

“In-store television is maturing as an advertising medium,” Beth Corbett,
vice president of New Media Services for Nielsen, Adweek.com reported, citing a news service.