3 Big Numbers is a weekly column that looks at a few key details from around the c-store industry.
From 7-Eleven’s Gulp Media to the Wawa’s Goose Media Network, convenience stores are making their mark on the retail media space.
Retail media networks (RMNs) are a large and growing piece of the digital advertising world, offering companies a way to generate incremental revenue as they target shoppers in stores, apps and other places where they might be making purchasing decisions. Worldwide spending on RMNs totalled over $115 billion in 2023, according to EMarketer and Inside Intelligence data, and it’s expected to grow to nearly $166 billion in 2025.
Companies like 7-Eleven, Casey’s General Stores and Wawa have already started exploring the space, while providers like Axonet are building their brands as aggregators that can use the vast numbers of smaller c-store owners to build a more robust network — and let those retailers make money off their ad space.
In today’s “3 Big Numbers,” we’re digging deeper into three of the major retail media networks in the c-store space.
12,000
The minimum number of 7-Eleven stores expected to have Gulp Radio by the end of 2025.
7-Eleven started the Gulp Media Network in October 2022. The biggest c-store company in North America was a natural early adopter, since it had access to all kinds of advertising infrastructure and a huge base of customers. The network launched with display, social and connected TV ads, and has expanded to in-store ad inventory like displays and Gulp Radio, the in-store audio service.
Gulp Radio made headlines this week for its big growth plans. Shoppers can currently hear its ads in more than 4,000 stores, but 7-Eleven expects to triple that over the next year or so to over 12,000 — practically the company’s entire footprint in North America.
7-Eleven is betting that CPGs will see this as a huge opportunity to reach its 12 million daily shoppers inside stores.
6 billion
The number of data points informing Casey’s Access.
One of the selling points of a retail media network is all the first-party data collected from customers. Casey’s General Stores’ RMN platform, Casey’s Access, for example, says on its website that it offers more than six billion data points from shoppers buying from or interacting with the brand. So every time a loyalty member ties their account to their purchases at checkout, the company learns what they’re buying and, over time, their shopping habits.
This means that the companies using Casey’s Access can not only see broad consumer trends at those stores, but can also target specific sub-groups based on their tendencies with advertising.
100 million
The number of opted-in shoppers Axonet is angling to reach.
EG America announced this week that it had joined Axonet’s aggregated retail media network.
With over 1,500 stores, EG America could develop a network of its own. But partnering up with Axonet, EG America said this week, will allow it to band with other c-stores to make their data and reach more appealing than any of them could on their own.
W. Capra, a c-store consultancy, created Axonet in 2023 to make reaching consumers in the fragmented c-store industry more efficient. And it aims to get to 100 million such consumers, according to its website.
