Love’s Travel Stops & Country Stores announced in October that it had launched Love’s Media Group.
Ashley Gockstetter, vice president of customer marketing and product, and Kevin Kuehl, vice president of merchandising, shared Monday at CSP’s Retail Media Network Forum how Love's is testing and measuring success in the program’s first year.
Art Sebastian, founder and CEO of Des Moines, Iowa-based NexChapter, moderated the panel and asked how manufacturers, like consumer-packaged goods companies, participate with Love’s Media Group.
- 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.
It’s really about sitting down and having conversations, Gockstetter said.
“This is our beta year,” she said. “We’ve talked about it that way. We’re really focused on understanding what drives mutually beneficial growth, for us and for our partners. And we’re a retailer first.”
The executive team at Love’s Travel Stops is focused on how Love’s Media Group is driving more demand, more throughput and more sales inside of its retail locations, Gockstetter said.
“We’re not trying to be a media company. We’re not trying to build out media company capabilities,” she said. “We’re trying to be a really intelligent retailer who creates the right value for customers.”
They do this by working with their external partners, and across departments internally.
Kuehl, who has been with Love’s for about a year, said he spent a lot of time building trust within the organization. When Love’s Media Group was launched, he integrated Tommy Greenberg, senior director of Love's Media Group, right into his marketing and merchandising strategies.
“And once we did that, and we aligned on what our mutual goals were, then it allowed us to just be heading in the right direction,” Kuehl said. “And it’s not to say that there’s not a little bit of stumbling along the way, a little bit of friction, but because of the trust that we built between us, we’re able to get through some of that stuff and really focus on what’s important.”
Sebastian also asked what “good” looks like for Love’s Media Group a year out from now.
For Gockstetter, “good” looks like Love’s delivering good value to its customers, and they see that by the way customers are interacting with Love’s when they are in their locations.
“We’re investing a ton of money into loyalty ourselves,” she said. “We invest a ton of money... in increasing the number of opportunities customers have to find us while they’re traveling, as well as having the right products when they get there. So to me, good looks like a partnership where our CPG partners are saying to us, ‘We have this new idea, and we came to you first, we want to test that with you.’”
The company relaunched its Love's Rewards program earlier this year.
“As we engage with our partner vendors and we continue to invest together, good for me looks like us continuing to activate new customers and drive growth across an expanding customer base,” Kuehl added.