Circle K gets serious about retail media

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Circle K gets serious about retail media

Circle K is more openly promoting and expanding its retail media network, Full Circle Media, as a way for advertisers to reach shoppers across its convenience stores, fuel pumps and digital channels in the U.S., Canada and Europe.

Last year, Circle K named Joell Robinson director of retail media for Circle K. She was previously senior director of retail media at Giant Eagle, where she helped build the Leap retail media network. The company began using the Full Circle Media branding in February. Before then, the company had been relatively quiet about its retail media business. Full Circle Media reaches more than 6,600 locations in the U.S. and delivers up to 200 million monthly impressions, according to Circle K.

“Circle K has had a network; it just hasn’t been out there,” Robinson told Modern Retail. “We’ve had suppliers participating, but [we are] really building up our capabilities, and our measurement, and the scalability of the whole thing, and making sure it’s built to last.”

Robinson said that previously, the company had been focused on retail media through its proprietary upsell screens, called Lift, in stores. The company has 13,200 screens installed at 6,600 locations, in addition to in-store digital walls. She describes the Lift screens as working similarly to sponsored searches online: When a customer purchases one candy bar, for example, it may tell them there’s a “two for $3” deal, indicating they should pick up another one.

“But there’s so much more,” Robinson said, adding that the retailer also has screens at the fuel pumps as well as placements on its app and emails. “We have a lot of great properties. In the past, we had kind of played in those areas, but [had] not necessarily put a formal offering around it,” she said.

Circle K’s approach to building out its retail media network is a bit of an anomaly in the industry. Other retailers, including Giant Eagle, are only just beginning to add in-store screens for retail media and have instead focused more on building out more advertising functionality on mobile and the web. Robinson said Circle K instead has had a heavy in-store media presence and is now building more digital components. Circle K does not have an e-commerce website. “I had to shift my thinking a bit, because I was used to having sponsored search and a lot of online placements.”

Robinson said her team’s focus has been to create a retail media program that spans many different channels instead of just mainly in-store media. In May, the media network started offering social and off-site placements. “Focusing on the full journey is really, really important to us,” Robinson said. “What we’ve been doing is better utilizing some of the channels we have.”

Her focus has also been on working more with Circle K’s merchandising team. “When the organization is supporting, say, a certain promotion, we really try to work with our suppliers to make sure that we’re the megaphone on that promotion, and that people know about it,” Robinson said.

She said the company is also experimenting with closed-loop measurement, as well as incrementality measurement, in email. “The idea is to get to this all-encompassing, omnichannel, closed-loop measurement,” Robinson said. “It’s really aligning the things underneath to make sure that that is transparent and defensible.”

Robinson said her team has been trying to bring more measurement to the fuel pump, and has been testing ways to bring those customers into the store via the screen or through SMS or push notifications on their phones. Full Circle Media includes screens at more than 3,800 fuel pumps.

“We have so much traffic at the pump, and I think even if we could get a small percentage of that, it would be material,” she said. “That gives them just the opportunity to engage with us and engage with our customer service folks, which I think is where we win them.”

Robinson also plans to leverage Circle K’s loyalty program, Inner Circle, which offers discounts on fuel and beverages, among other perks. The loyalty program has grown to more than 5,000 stores in 34 states, and has 14.7 million members. Circle K just redesigned the program to reward customers based on how often they visit the store or the pump.

“Especially in retail media, having a strong loyalty program is really the foundation of what we’re trying to do,” Robinson said. “Our willingness and our enthusiasm around our loyalty program has been incredibly refreshing for me, and great to see from a retail media standpoint, because who I know I can measure. Who we know, we can engage with.”

Convenience-store retail media is still in the early innings in the U.S. Retail media analyst Andrew Lipsman, in his Media, Ads and Commerce newsletter, said C-store retail media networks are often an afterthought in the U.S. retail media conversation because the market is fragmented between too many different chains.

“In the quest for CPG brand dollars, they take a back seat to Amazon, Walmart, Kroger, Instacart and nearly a dozen others,” he wrote. He said outside of 7-Eleven’s Gulp Media Network — which reaches more than 13,000 stores across the country — he believes “for other C-store RMNs to achieve viability, the market will ultimately need to consolidate into an aggregated media network.”

Frank Beard, principal of Konbini Strategy, a marketing and PR firm for companies that serve the fuel and convenience-retail industries, said it’s a “no-brainer” for Circle K to want to invest more into retail media. “Convenience stores have a lot of traffic flow,” he said. “It’s a natural place to put an advertisement, especially when it comes to products that are sold in a convenience store.”

But he said retailers can’t lose sight of investing in the customer experience in favor of functions like retail media that are aimed at attracting advertisers rather than customers. “Retail media works when you have a compelling enough retail offer to drive people into the store in the first place.”

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