DailyDOOH

Gail Chiasson, North American Editor

Gas Station TV, believed to be the largest player in the digital gas media category across the U.S., has selected Ayuda Media Systems’ comprehensive Platform to manage its media sales and operations workflow.

The Ayuda Platform consists of four products for digital video advertising networks: Juice (new sales tools for CRM, availability checking, and instant proposal generation), Splash (for scheduling, player and content management), Finance (for invoicing and leasing) and Impress (for retailer and partner collaboration). Of special interest is to note that the platform allows GSTV to empower clients with the ability to traffic and schedule ads directly to screens themselves, a key business advantage supporting its recently-launched local sales division.

“We were looking for the right partner for the past three years,” David Leider, CEO of GSTV, says. “With Wayne (a GE Energy Business) as a partner and with solid financing, GSTV is looking at growth from over 29 million to 70 million consumers, and we needed a full comprehensive, operational management system. That’s what we’re getting from Ayuda, literally everything from soup to nuts. Ayuda’s product is way over anything we’ve seen elsewhere.”

GSTV, whose at-the-pump television network reaches close to 30 million monthly viewers in over 100 markets, needed an integrated platform to efficiently run its entire network of screens at the pump, as well as automate core media business functions. Ayuda’s proven platform was considered imperative to help manage station and viewer impression growth.

GSTV’s growth is being fueled by its partnership with Wayne. The companies jointly launched inOvationTV this past September with a Wayne investment valued at more than $50 million. Wayne’s investment makes inOvationTV available to qualified stations free-of-charge, to be installed either as a retrofit to stations currently using Wayne’s industry-leading Ovation dispensers, or to retailers installing new Ovation dispensers from the factory. inOvationTV will triple GSTV’s monthly viewership to more than 70 million consumers.

Ayuda’s Splash provides centralized management for media distribution to sites using various vendor players, including Scala, inOvationTV, and other players currently in operation or development by GSTV. This player-agnostic scheduling capability enables GSTV to meet its expansion objectives from a centralized platform. Rather than creating different schedules and managing different CMS solutions, the primary user interface is now Splash – reducing traffic workload and potential human error. Similarly, in addition to the traffic and audience data provided by Nielsen, GSTV now will enhance its Proof of Play data for its various sub-networks by aggregating them into Splash, which provides a single point of access for reporting performance. Ayuda’s platform will provide GSTV with functions from pre-sales pipeline management, to billing and invoicing, and the enhanced proof of play.

Leider says, “Ayuda is the only vendor that has demonstrated a deep understanding of how to provide us with a holistic, integrated solution that will enable us to significantly streamline the way we run our business. The unique combination of CRM, billing, scheduling, content management and player software allows us to run our business end-to-end.

“This now enables us to focus on growth and add more stations quickly, as it’s a fully automated process, We needed the whole backend operation for us to go forward and we needed the right partner to make it happen. Ayuda offers the best tools. Once we saw what it could offer, it was an easy decision.”

Andreas Soupliotis, Ayuda’s CEO, says, ”GSTV is the undisputed leader and largest player in the digital gas media category and its selection of the Ayuda Platform represents a real game-changer for Ayuda. So many vendors have been courting GSTV for years, and I am both thrilled and honored that its highly diligent selection process chose us. The bar was exceptionally high – GSTV was looking for a totally integrated system that could scale with its growth in the coming years. We engineered the Ayuda Platform with integration in mind from the ground up – from CRM to scheduling to CMS to players to POP and invoicing. We are the only single-vendor solution offering all of the above in one platform.

“GSTV is one of the top networks in the US – up there with Zoom, RMG, Captivate and Touchtunes. Its digital footprint is massive. Having GSTV as a client really establishes Ayuda as a serious vendor to DOOH networks. Our strategy of being more than just a CMS + Player vendor is working. GSTV chose us because we offer a complete integrated product with CRM, ERP, Invoicing, CMS and player, while other vendors are strictly a CMS + player.”

We asked Soupliotis about Juice, Ayuda’s new product that completes its platform for GSTV.

“We are officially launching Juice at the DSE show,” he says. “GSTV is the first client to go live on Juice, In fact, its local business is already live and using it to send out proposals.

“The big deal about Juice is that we feel that we have solved the most difficult problem for digital networks: how to check avails. Just as Apple thinks they have ‘cracked’ the TV with the next version of Apple TV, we feel that we have ‘cracked’ avails for digital networks with Juice. Checking avails is really complex for digital: how does a sales rep know what to pitch? Is it based on budget? Number of spots? Day parts? Target demographics? Audience numbers? Juice solves all that for the sales rep with just a few clicks, and then generates a proposal. This all gets seamlessly pushed to Splash for scheduling, and then makes it over to our Finance product for invoicing and financial reporting.”

GSTV can be viewed throughout the country at leading gas retailers like Chevron, Conoco-Phillips, Gulf, Arco, BP, Exxon-Mobil, Speedway, Shell, Murphy USA, and Sunoco. GSTV’s exclusive content partners in the gas space include ESPN, Bloomberg TV, and Turner Broadcasting System’s HLN and entertainment news show Showbiz Tonight, as well as local AccuWeather and its original social media platform ‘Your Neighborhood’.

With offices in Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, and New York, GSTV is a proven tool for driving business for advertisers and increasing the revenue stream for gas retailers. As the first independently audited and measured network in the gas space, GSTV delivers Nielsen verified viewership, demographics, dwell time, network size and recall. Gas Station TV is a Destination Media Inc. company.

Ayuda Media Systems, an eight-year-old, Montreal-based company, provides the DOOH industry with the most sophisticated media operations management platform. As the makers of The Ayuda Platform, Ayuda’s products have invoiced over a quarter of a billion dollars in OOH billing and provided media management functions for more than 300,000 advertising faces globally.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 5th, 2012 at 13:01 @584 and is filed under DailyDOOH Update. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.