Building a retail media network (RMN) is not as easy as flipping on a light switch. It’s a complicated business.
Tommy Greenberg (pictured below), senior director of Love's Media Group, shared this insight during a podcast at CSP’s Retail Media Network Forum, held May 4-6 in Chicago. Greenberg talked to CSP Executive Editor Hannah Hammond about how Love’s Travel Stops built its RMN, Love’s Media Group, what advice he’d give to other retailers who want to get one started and more.
- Oklahoma City-based Love’s is tied for No. 14 on CSP’s 2026 Top 40 update to the 2025 Top 202 ranking of U.S. c-store chains by store count. Watch for the full 2026 Top 202 ranking in June.
Listen to the podcast recording of this interview here or read the Q&A below.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Hannah Hammond: Can you tell me how long you've been at Love's and how you got into retail media in the first place?
Tommy Greenberg: I've been at Love's for six months, but that is a culmination of many things over my career. I've been in retail almost 20 years now. I started at Target doing all of the corporate merchant jobs. I really learned retail through building out the strategy, picking items, understanding how a P&L worked and how to build out a long-term strategy. What I knew, though, was my favorite thing was telling brand stories, and I loved doing that as a merchant.
As I started looking at what my career could be, it was an opportunity to say, ‘I know that I want to get into sales, and what does that look like?’ That was almost 10 years ago now, and it was kind of at the start of retail media. Target had a team, and knowing some people that did that, over some drinks and lunches over about six months, I said, ‘Let me work on what that could be. What is monetizing data? What is selling advertising?’
I got to enter that space really green. But I got to sit next to someone who had been in ad sales for 15 years, and so we just traded stories back and forth and questions of those little embarrassing things that you might not want to ask publicly. She got to ask about retail, and I got to ask about advertising. And so, for about two months, we put each other through a boot camp and came out on the other side in a really good way. So that's how I got into retail media, and from there, it's just been an incredible journey over the last 8-plus years.
Hammond: Love's Media Group started at the end of last year. Could you talk about how Love's started its retail media network and why?
Greenberg: Love's has been on this transformation. It's a 60-plus year old company that has operated in just such an amazing capacity, but didn't tell a lot of people about it, right? And so, as we've brought in some new leaders both on the marketing, the tech and the merchandising side, their role was to modernize what we're doing. And part of that was, ‘Hey, we have a fiercely loyal commercial driver, and we're building out loyalty from everyone else, the casual customer.’ So we said we need to start to be able to monetize that and start to monetize some of the assets that we have on the lot. And so that was where the conception of retail media came.
Hammond: And you already mentioned a couple of other departments, like marketing. How do you cross-collaborate and bring together the leaders from all these important pieces to work together to help the retail media network?
Greenberg: That's super important. If we aren't focused on retail first, and not media, we're missing the mark because what we're trying to do both from a media perspective and from Love's perspective is sell more stuff, right? That's going to be the goal. And so, collaborating with merchandising, with internal marketing partners, with the tech teams so that we know what's possible from a tech perspective, what the customer is wanting and telling us from a merchandising perspective, and then getting in front of them to say, ‘Hey, by the way, we have this really hot deal,’ right? And meeting them at the point that they're excited and ready to make a purchase, we can help drive that conversion.
Hammond: Are there any learnings that you've taken away from the first six or so months you've been here?
Greenberg: So many, yeah. I think one of the biggest things is not underestimating change management. While Love's is going through so many different changes from a tech standpoint, from a merchandising standpoint, remembering that if everything is new for someone, bringing them along and educating them on the journey, that's been huge.
Hammond: Are there any common misconceptions that you feel like people have about retail media networks?
Greenberg: It can't be turned on like a light switch. You have a chief financial officer, or a president of a company, who says, ‘Hey, I've seen a lot of articles, and I've heard some podcasts about retail media, and we should do that. And I like the money that it generates. So go ahead and hire someone and make that happen.’
But the reality is it's really a complicated business. If you think about all the different advertising agencies out there that have built their entire model to drive revenue for their clients and manage that, it's going to be really important for us to be able to build that capability out, but it takes time. So you have to do that in an intelligent way, being efficient with the dollars and the resources we have but making sure that you're building it structurally correct as well.
Hammond: How do you think that Love's has benefited from it so far?
Greenberg: I think the biggest thing, outside of incremental revenue coming in, which is always good from a company perspective, it's the deepening of partnerships with the vendor community. Because now we're not just having merchandising conversations, we are having holistic business conversations. So, what is their brand marketing team doing? What's their national marketing team doing? How does that impact the new launch we're going to have and how do we tell that full 360 story? And so it's just brought us together so that everybody, both on the vendor side and on the Love's side, are all sitting together instead of being siloed.
Hammond: What are the next steps looking out a year, or maybe in five years, from now? What are your goals for Love's Media Group?
Greenberg: The component of continuing to build those internal partnerships is going to be huge. As I said, if we lose focus on the retail side, then we have really missed the mark. And so for us, the biggest things we're going to be doing is deepening partnerships, expanding the available inventory that we have, because right now we are selling the existing assets that Love's had before I started. The next step is expanding that to additional placements within the lot, and then digitally, how do we open up more inventory so that we can reach people wherever they are in their journey?
Hammond: Is there any advice that you think convenience stores could take from kind of the big box or other retailers like a Target?
Greenberg: I think it's growing the tech stack responsibly. For this conference that we're here at, you have a lot of ad tech partners that can do some really amazing things. Understanding what their capabilities are and how they fit within what you are doing, and then learning if you are a company that likes to borrow, build or make it your own—and that's going be critical because you have to pick out your point of differentiation and then go at it very quickly with tech partners in mind—but then also knowing your tech capabilities.
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