In partnership with

Hello!

Welcome to the 14th edition of Always Be Convenient, arriving conveniently in your inbox by way of the internet. This newsletter is for convenience leaders just like you who are navigating today’s digitized world. You can also find previous issues in the archives.

I’m back at home this week after four nights and five days in Schaumburg, IL. It was a lot of time away, both for me and for attendees of the two events hosted by CSP, but the response from the industry has been overwhelmingly positive.

These two events – Retail Media Network Forum and the C-StoreTEC Conference – were packed with education, inspiration, networking, and information-sharing. They were also tailor-made for convenience, from the speakers to the topics.

While I’ll always encourage others to draw inspiration from everywhere, especially as it relates to convenience, there’s something to be said for an event experience that just nails the needs of its audience. Both of these events, each in their first outing, did exactly that.

For more insight behind each event, I’d recommend Rachel Gignac’s write-ups:

• CSP’s Retail Media Network Forum Highlights a New Era of Advertising

• Convenience Retailers, Tech Providers Collaborate at CSP’s C-StoreTEC

If you missed either of these events last week – or felt FOMO from all the photos on LinkedIn – both will be back again in 2025.

Speaking of 2025, do you have any must-attend events on your calendar already? I’d love to hear where you’re headed. Hit reply and let me know. 

Conveniently,
Mike

A MESSAGE FROM OUR PARTNER

Modernize your marketing with AdQuick

AdQuick unlocks the benefits of Out Of Home (OOH) advertising in a way no one else has. Approaching the problem with eyes to performance, created for marketers with the engineering excellence you’ve come to expect for the internet.

Marketers agree OOH is one of the best ways for building brand awareness, reaching new customers, and reinforcing your brand message. It’s just been difficult to scale. But with AdQuick, you can easily plan, deploy and measure campaigns just as easily as digital ads, making them a no-brainer to add to your team’s toolbox.

Learn more now.

You have the ingredients

The response to Retail Media Network Forum last week – both in attendance and engagement – shows how relevant this topic is for convenience retail today. It’s not new to the retail industry, but it’s broader application within c-store has yet to take hold.

I had the opportunity to lead a few sessions at the event where we tackled what our team has defined as the ingredients for retail media. It’s an important concept for this capability, as without the ingredients you don’t have much to work with.

For retailers interested in retail media, there are three foundational elements you have to become more familiar with:

1. Customer data

2. Advertising inventory

3. Strategy and planning

Each of these elements is tied to more well-known processes and capabilities inside of an organization, though each one also takes on new meaning for retail media.

The idea of transforming our thinking was a core premise last week. Attendees had to make the mental shift to expand how they thought about key marketing concepts in the context of retail media.

• First-party data is generated from loyalty platforms, but customer data incorporates many more sources of insight that are critical for targeting and analysis.

• What can be viewed as marketing channels or paid media is transformed into sellable advertising inventory when client partners gain access to deploy their messages within those assets.

• Every large-scale business initiative has an underlying tie to the enterprise strategy. Retail media must complement that same thinking or risk derailing business processes and revenue planning.

Even though you and your teams are working with these ingredients today, you may not see how they come together differently without the recipe.

Equipping yourself and your stakeholders with ground-up education is a great place to begin. When you’re starting something new, you’ve got to get the lay of the land first.

Once you have a grasp on what you’re working with, then it’s time to lean in. Don’t get bogged down in pursuit of perfection. Like anything that’s new, you can expect it to be a bit bumpy in the beginning.

And when you work with partners who are co-investing in the learning experience, you’ll both come out stronger together. This was reiterated by retailers and CPGs alike in the various discussions last week: this is a place to test, iterate, and win together.

Many are still figuring things out in retail media, including the biggest players in the broader retail industry. And those who think they’ve solved it probably haven’t gone deep enough.

Now is a great time to take stock of where you stand, assess the state of your ingredients, and find a way to get something cooking – fast!