Don’t make it a money grab, Patrick McLean, chief marketing officer at Love’s Travel Stops & Country Stores Inc., told CSP in regard to retail media networks (RMNs). The convenience-store and travel stop chain is rolling out Love’s Media Group at the start of 2026.
Retail media is not just a means to extract more money from suppliers, McLean said. The right approach, he said, is to use it as an offering to strengthen the relationships with supplier partners. The money will come, but it will come in the form of investment, he said.
“We’re building this for the long term,” said McLean. “My advice to any other retailers out there—think of it like a business for the long term, which means building and establishing relationships. The best businesses are ones that are built on the foundation of making their customers successful. And so that’s the way we think about entering this business ourselves.”
Suppliers are seeking growth opportunities, he says, and one of the things that they have clearly been asking Oklahoma City-based Love’s for is an increased level of co-marketing. By integrating merchandising and marketing, there’s a more holistic plan, McLean said.
“Our partners are all really hungry to participate in it and elevate the relationship that we have more broadly,” he said. “When you have a transactional merchant relationship, you can only really take growth so far. But I've certainly found in my past, when you bring marketing and merchandising together to the supplier partners, it really elevates the opportunity to grow together.”
- Love’s Travel Stops & Country Stores is No. 15 on CSP’s 2025 Top 202 ranking of U.S. convenience-store chains by store count.
What makes Love’s Media Group unique is its position in both the commercial and professional driver channels, said McLean.
“The other piece for us is we control 100% of our property,” he said. “We don’t have franchisees. We own our pumps. We own every part of the experience, and that control allows us to be more innovative, and also it gives the CPG partners a high degree of confidence that when we say we’re going to do something, we’re going to execute with excellence, which I think is a cornerstone of what you see when you go into a Love's location.”
Advertising strategy
Love’s advertises at the traditional and diesel pumps with physical and digital signage. Inside the store, more than 500 of the chain’s stores have programmable display screens and self-serve screens. There is also physical signage throughout the store done directly through Love’s own printing facility. In the future, Love’s will slowly introduce additional products in terms of paid media solutions in partnership with tech partners, McLean said.
To start off, Love’s is going to have a select number of beta partners—large suppliers—for the first year so it can learn how to strongly execute, because this is all new for the company, McLean said.
There will be other opportunities for smaller partners to plug in, he said, but the focus right now is to is to get in market with some of those key partners.
Sequencing all the demand that Love’s is seeing is one of the challenges, McLean said.
“’I’m very conscious of not scaling too quickly because we want the quality of the experience to be there, both for our customers and for our marketing partners,” he said.
Data-driven targeting
With more than 2.5 million loyalty members across the commercial and casual segments, Love’s can target media and promotions based on customer data.
“The loyalty program gives us rich first-party data. We have an ID associated with the people in our loyalty app, so we can see their purchase behavior on an anonymized basis, and we see patterns,” said McLean. “And so we can create very specific segments and audiences that we think will respond to a certain type of communication.”
As Love’s RMN expands, McLean said that it will match its first-party data with third-party data that’s available to further personalize.
Love’s terms and conditions are clear with loyalty members about the use of the data, McLean said.
“We’re very conscious of customer privacy and compliance with all applicable laws,” he said. “We’re focused on making it a rich value exchange between customers willing to provide access to the data and the use of that data if they’re getting value in exchange for it. If I’m delivering you a great customer experience that’s really relevant to you, and I’m respecting your privacy and respecting the data that I have on you, the customers respond really positively to that.”
Return on investment
To measure success, Love’s will be introducing closed-loop measurement, which is a method of tracking customer journeys from the ad exposure to the sale in comparison to a control group. Love’s will share this data with supplier partners.
“We have a number of analytics partnerships that were also in discussions to roll out to provide even more advanced multi touch attribution measurements.” McLean said. “We will also do brand lift studies that will be available to supply our partners as well.”
McLean said that Love’s will educate and train employees as it starts to rolls out the retail media network.
“Training will be everything from them understanding how to execute in-store on behalf of these partners, to the loyalty side of it and making sure that they’re informing customers of all the benefits of being in the loyalty program,” he said.
To lead the initiative, Love's has appointed Tommy Greenberg as senior director of Love's Media Group. Greenberg built the client services team and operational infrastructure for grocery chain Lowe's Media Network, Mooresville, North Carolina, and Target Corp.’s retail media business, Roundel, based in Minneapolis, where he led retail media sales efforts.
“Tommy’s got a great background,” McLean said. “He’s had two very unique experiences in retail media businesses, both with Lowe’s and with Target, and he has a tremendous track record of growing those portfolios, but also, really caring for his clients and for the end customers.”
Greenberg also understands the merchandising side of retail media because he was a merchant earlier in his career, McLean said.
“That combination of two really successful roles at two of the larger retail media networks out there, and also his background as a merchant was a really powerful combination for us,” McLean said.
Love’s has 661 travel stops and convenience stores in 42 states. At the start of the year, it said it planned to add 20 new travel stops in 2025.
Interested in learning more about the latest in convenience-store technology? Don't miss C-StoreTEC 2025 (Oct. 27-29, Plano, Texas)—the industry's premier technology leadership event created by retailers, for retailers. Visit https://cstoretec.com to secure your spot at this groundbreaking conference where convenience retail leaders collaborate to drive digital transformation and accelerate growth.
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