Huck's Sees Sales Lift From New Audio Advertising Marketplace

CARMI, Ill. — Huck's convenience stores are experiencing a sales lift following beta testing of the Vibenomics Audio Out-of-Home Advertising Marketplace platform.

Vibenomics, provider of custom streaming radio stations for retailers, launched the Audio Advertising Marketplace as a platform to generate new revenue for participating stores and help shopper marketers target customers in-store with a new form of retail media.

For each campaign that participating retailers run, the Vibenomics platform relieves the cost of selling and managing ads, giving c-store operators the ability to generate profit and an opportunity to offset the traditional cost of business music licensing, according to the company.

"What had been a cost center for providing background music feeds, can now be a new revenue stream for convenience stores, with material effect on c-store margins," said Brent Oakley, CEO and co-founder of Vibenomics. "Convenience store operators appreciate the unique partner program we have developed that enables them to transform the legacy music providers into a new revenue generating engine for their business, and a disruptive new marketing tool for their vendor categories."

Huck's beta tested the Vibenomics Audio Out-of-Home Advertising Marketplace, which resulted in significant sales lift and return on ad spend for its vendor category advertisers, including a 21-percent increase in sales for an energy drink product.

"At Huck's, we are constantly looking to enhance the customer experience in each of our stores, while raising the bottom line," expressed Jon Bunch, director of Marketing Business Development for Huck's. "Our category partners are excited by the new Huck's Radio audio OOH [out-of-home] advertising ability, and my team is pumped to be moving more product and creating a new profit center all while enhancing the in-store experience, thanks to Vibenomics."

To better quantify the audio OOH opportunity, Vibenomics leveraged location intelligence from SafeGraph alongside U.S. census block insights to analyze visitor behavior and demographic characteristics across more than 150,000 individual points of interest in the c-store industry. When compared to industry averages, the Vibenomics C-Store Audio OOH Ad Marketplace locations had:

• 88 percent higher foot traffic;
• 72 percent more unique visitors;
• 9 percent higher visit frequency; and
• 9.5 percent more likely to have household income over $60,000.

Vibenomics' technology brands to target the precise audience profile, behaviors and locations that maximize conversions. Advertisers can choose to provide their own creative assets, or rely on Vibenomics' full-service sonic branding studio to produce custom audio spots as a value-add, for campaigns ranging from general use national spots to highly personalized hyper-local or retailer co-branded media strategies.

"With the innovation and explosive growth happening in convenience, this retail sector has emerged as a natural fit for Vibenomics that enables our audio out-of-home advertising to reach the majority of U.S. consumers during those critical final footsteps along the path to purchase for a diverse range of product categories," noted Oakley.

Founded in 2016 in Indianapolis as Fuzic, the company rebranded to Vibenomics Inc. in 2017. The Vibenomics C-store Audio Out-of-Home Advertising Marketplace launched with 4,000 c-stores across 48 states. By the year's end, the number of locations is expected to grow to 9,000.

Carmi-based Huck's, the retail arm of Martin & Bayley Inc., operates 123 large-format convenience store locations across Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri and Tennessee. The company recently revealed a new modern brand design and updated retail environment.