All about attention with GSTV’s Sean McCaffrey

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Sean McCaffrey is the President and CEO of GSTV, the data-driven video network reaching 116 million consumers monthly across tens of thousands of convenience partners and fuel retailers nationwide. He is set to speak at Retail Brew’s upcoming event, The Future of Retail Marketing: Content, Data and the Power of Community, on March 19th on the evolution of the media landscape. Ahead of the event, we caught up with him to hear how he and his team at GSTV are thinking about consumer behavioral insights and leveraging data and technology to scale GSTV’s platform.

Retail is moving at the speed of culture. What’s one shift you think marketers are still underestimating in 2026?

My view on this is we’re underestimating the fluidity and opportunity between physical and digital consumer behavior in marketing. In other words, marketers and their associated media spend still obsess a little too much on things like digital metrics, social metrics, viewership, etc. We forget that as consumers, we bought it, we watched it, we listened to it, we viewed it—that’s a very fluid experience through the digital and physical world.

So you see it in a lot of the excitement around in store media that there’s an opportunity to move beyond app and paid search when it comes to commerce media. People are realizing screens in the store, screens near the store, that sort of thing. That’s what we’re hearing from brands for the most part that those that are accelerating there faster are seeing the benefit of it.

Let’s connect storytelling to measurable outcomes. Where are you seeing the strongest link between content and conversion right now?

For GSTV, we program a show each day that is both content and commercial messaging driven by the same consumer context. It’s a moment in time where you’re shopping more that day. Fuel day, for example, is a surrogate for exponentially more spending and big box grocery. You’re listening to music or audiobooks or podcasting while you’re driving. You’re thinking about your budget, the cost of things, and how far your dollar is going to go. So contextually, we see the brands and advertisers that lean into and use our context—financial services, those with music and culture strategies, those with food strategies—and link that with content and consumer messaging make a lot more impact.

For example, we have two programming tentpoles: Summer of Drive and Holiday Rush. Those remind people that consumer behavior is different during those times of year. The same way you design a social strategy for TikTok or you design a CTV strategy for Peacock, you can design a real-world digital video consumer strategy for GSTV.

What metric matters more to you today than it did two years ago, and why?

It’s no longer just reach. It’s no longer just audience. It’s attention and real outcomes. In other words, not just the ad served or [if] it was viewed, but did it drive sales?

We have measured attention in the physical world with Lumen here and found out we have over 90% attention ads to screen; it’s a very real world, uncluttered, not distracted environment. We also do all sorts of third-party validation around campaign efficacy, so Veeva Crossix for pharma and ABCS Insights and Circana for CPG as a couple of examples.

It’s not good enough that the ad just served, but did it drive an outcome? And that outcome being something that grows business.

What’s one experiment your team ran recently that changed the way you think about growth?

We’ve always had programming and have had people sponsor content or bring their IP to use, but 2025 was the first time we put out our own programming tentpoles that were a blend of partner and homegrown content.

We saw advertisers step forward and want to be sponsors and integrate into that content for the summer. For example, two of our partners, Matador, which is a huge travel publisher on TikTok, focused on summer road trips. And then Big Machine Label Group out of Nashville, which is one of the largest country labels out there, connected summer road trips to country music which just goes hand in glove.

That was a real light bulb moment for us as well in terms of how people can use our platform. Not just the why part, but the how: How can they use our platform more effectively?