Sure, we live in a media-saturated culture, but are you ready to watch commercial television as you pump gas? You need to be because gas station television is here already, perhaps coming soon to a store near you.
Three start-ups — PumpTopTV, Gas Station TV, and Fuelcast Network — are racing to build share in this latest out-of-home video business. I’m not here to tout this as the next Google. But after a phone chat recently with David Leider, CEO of Gas Station TV, I found the business concept intriguing and logical.
Gas Station runs a four-minute loop of ESPN and CBS content with commercials interspersed. That is roughly the time of a typical fill-the-tank visit. The accountability that advertisers always look for can be provided with some precision by the station’s count of total transactions in a day.
Leider said he can easily make the case that customers will be attentive. “They are tied to the screens with an eight-foot rubber hose.”
Also, unlike Gannett’s Captivate, which specializes in elevator video, the Gas Station clips run with sound and have a longer exposure time — if not quite that of similar offerings in health clubs and on airplanes.
Recently passing its second anniversary, Gas Station TV now has more than 5,000 screens (a total its two competitors either have achieved or expect to this year). That translates to roughly 500 stations, with the screens mounted on each side of an average of five pumps.
With more than 100,000 gas stations in the U.S., there is lots of expansion possible and plenty of “room for multiple players,” as Leider put it. He declined to reveal financial particulars except to say that the company is already cash-flow positive.
Especially impressive to me is the company’s triple-threat ad base. About 70 percent of the commercials are national with a tilt to automotive products, Leider said (he and other principals come from media sales not tech backgrounds). The rest are split between local and neighborhood and promotions for the stations’ own convenience stores — two Pepsis for a dollar or the like. That is reason enough for stations to agree to installation of the TV monitors, because the pay-at-the-pump trend has been a drag on their food sales.
Whether or not gas station television sweeps the country, it is a tidy example of the competition newspaper organizations will face in new fields — like hyperlocal — they are scrambling to develop, in the face of continued tough sledding for stalwarts of the good old days like print classified.
