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Networks are built for their market, and it shows. Any screen concept that assumes a single site archetype breaks on contact with the second country it meets.
But work across enough of these networks and the constants become as striking as the variety. Every site exists because a vehicle needs energy, and almost every one sells something alongside it. The customer's attention passes through the same two places: the point where they fuel or charge, and the store they walk into afterwards. That is the core. Everything above it is format.
Separating the core from the variation is the most useful early move a network can make, because the core is what standardises globally and the variation is what has to be decided locally.
At the pump, the customer is stationary and unoccupied for one to four minutes. At a charger, considerably longer — real paid fast-charging sessions average around forty minutes according to US Department of Energy data, not the figure charge curves imply. Then they either walk into the store or they do not, and most of what the site earns beyond fuel margin depends on which.
Pump screens are the one surface nearly every format shares, which makes them the natural spine of a station concept. They are also the surface most often left out of media planning, because they belong to the dispenser rather than the signage estate — different supplier, different system, sometimes a different department. Doohlabs delivers advertising to pump screens through a direct integration with Gilbarco Veeder-Root, so forecourt inventory is planned, sold and reported in the same system as the screens inside.
That matters because the forecourt and the store are one journey. The pump screen is where a customer learns what is worth walking in for; the screens inside complete the decision. Connecting them — same campaign, same audience, same measurement — is the highest-leverage move available on a station site, and it only works if both are addressable from one platform.
An unmanned site has the forecourt and nothing else. A convenience format adds an entrance, a short shopper path and a checkout. A full-service site adds prepared food, seating, a much larger store and often a charging area with real dwell attached. These are not three stages of one thing; they are three businesses sharing a canopy.
The specification that survives this works like vehicle equipment grades: a base every site implements, then defined levels above it, each including everything below. Levels are set by zone coverage rather than screen count, because zones are what a customer passes through and what an advertiser buys. And each level carries its own commercial case — expected media revenue, effect on basket, operating time saved through automation — so a site or local operator is comparing investment cases rather than receiving an instruction. Where sites are franchised or dealer-operated, that difference decides whether a rollout reaches them at all.
On sites with a real food offer, menu boards are the largest and most-viewed installation on the property, and the interface through which customers order.
They also have to change themselves. Breakfast becomes lunch becomes evening; each site's assortment differs from the next; a product sells out and has to leave the board before someone queues for it. Driving that from product, pricing and opening-hours data rather than by hand is what keeps a network's boards accurate in year three.
Done well, one useful thing follows: a board that already knows the offer, the hour and the site can carry commercial content in the same frame — a supplier's product featured while its category is on screen. Operational and commercial content run on one system as equal partners, not one bolted onto the other.
Station retail media is assumed to begin with national brand campaigns. In practice the first durable revenue comes from closer to home: the suppliers already selling into the store. Beverage, snack and confectionery brands, coffee and food service partners, car care, lubricants, wash and service partners — all already have a commercial relationship with the network and a trade-marketing budget, and none of them need persuading that the audience is real. They need a way to buy.
How a network builds the capability to sell to them varies more than the advertisers do. Some start with an agile media sales partner who already knows the buyers and can carry the first year while the network learns the business from the inside. Others build in-house immediately, usually on the back of one or two key recruits who have sold media before. Both routes work. What does not work is assuming the capability assembles itself once the screens are up.
Self-service belongs alongside that from the start rather than arriving as a later phase. A trade partner will not call an account manager to book two weeks on coffee, so the self-service route has to exist while the direct motion is still finding its feet, and it grows as the partner base grows. Occasionally the order reverses: a network with genuinely strong relationships with large brands — brands that already treat it as a media owner rather than as a retail account — can lead with self-service and let direct selling follow behind it.
In In-Store IMPACT, partners can also book against pre-built audiences themselves, inside guardrails the network sets — approved formats, placement rules and content standards enforced automatically rather than reviewed by hand. Trade budgets that already exist become media revenue before a sales organisation does.
Programmatic demand is a real prospect, and a slower one. It is worth being straightforward about why: in-store is a new environment for the buy side. Planners have few benchmarks for it, agencies have no settled process around it, and measurement conventions are still forming. That learning curve belongs to the advertiser as much as to the network. Programmatic is therefore the motion that matures last — valuable for filling what direct selling and self-service leave unsold, not for starting the business.
The specialisation here is not technical sophistication. It is knowing which decisions matter: that the pump screen belongs in the media network and how to reach it; that the forecourt and store are one journey; that menu content must follow local assortment and opening hours; that the level model is what makes a varied estate specifiable; that trade partners are the first advertisers and need a self-service route on day one.
Much of it is about building audiences that attract advertisers and having technology that enables using your valuable data to do it. Also, you want to target those audiences at different stations with relevant messaging, when they can best be reached. This is exactly what Doohlabs’ In-Store IMPACT platform was designed to do.
None of that shows up in a feature comparison. It shows up as a rollout that reaches every site, screens still accurate two years later, and inventory that actually sells.
