NBC Pushes its Gas Pump Profile
NBC is looking for more mileage from its presence on TV screens at gas pumps around the country, with plans to add 100 locations to its gas station network in top 20 markets.
NBC Everywhere, NBC Universal’s out-of-home arm, is reaching beyond more than 500 locations it’s established in the U.S. to screen video clips over the past two years through Fuelcast, the pump-top digital network. It reaches an estimated 12 million viewers on 6,000 screens each month.
“We’ve really seen great results as we’ve honed the product,” said Mark French, NBC Everywhere senior vice president and general manager. “We’ve seen great traction from this medium for national advertisers as well as local advertisers.”
The medium consists of 17-inch LCD screens that automatically turn on and play a 2 ½-minute loop of NBC entertainment and local weather updates as soon as a customer starts pumping gas. The loop spans the average time of the typical refueling process takes.
NBC produces customized content for Fuelcast, including a greeting from an NBC celebrity and clips from “Access Hollywood” that are 15 to 20 seconds in length, interspersed with 15-second ad spots. The network has also produced customized spots for some advertisers, including one for the California lottery featuring a character, which appears to be speaking from inside a gas pump.
NBC gauges the impact on this captive audience through focus groups and the product lift that local advertisers have seen, according to French. He said NBC is likely to increase the length of the current loops to cover the total time of transactions that customers initiate, with screens coming to life as they dip their bankcards.
The “Fuelcast Network powered by NBC” is currently playing on screens in Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, San Diego, CA, Washington, D.C. and Miami, FL.
