• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, February 25, 2025

In what is being touted as the first global attention study of its kind, the Co-op Media Network (CMN) this morning released findings of data from Lumen Research showing that convenience store advertising delivers twice the "visibility," three times the dwell time, and four times the brand recall of campaigns running in larger retail media network store locations.

The higher-than-expected performance is being attributed to the increased frequency of shopper visits to convenience stores, as well as the "uniqueness" of their formats.

"In small stores, shoppers revisit aisles multiple times and so encounter the same ads and messages multiple times, creating a higher frequency of exposure," explains Lumen CEO Mike Follett, adding: "That builds memories through aggregate attention, which drives memory-based outcomes such as awareness, consideration and intent.”

Lumen, which is among the leading suppliers of so-called attention metrics, utilizes computervision (see heat-mapping image below) to understand what ads and other content consumers fixate on, and sometimes supplements it with brand-lift surveys, as it did for CMN's project, which utilized "unobtrusive eye-tracking glasses to monitor what people were looking at as they shopped store aisles (see image above).

Among other things, the approach enabled researchers to understand the impact of ads that were within the peripheral vision of shoppers, providing data on the impact of ads that could have been seen without direct focus.

The bottom line: ads placed in smaller convenience stores outperformed those in larger-format retail media stories by significant margins, in terms of visibility, frequency and recall.

“Traditionally, in-store advertising has been viewed by media buyers as a pure sales activation tool that was great for last-minute promotions but not for brand-building," CMN Chief Membership & Customer Officer Kenyatte Nelson noted.