From footfall to audience: McDonald's and the rise of venue media

In August 2026 the McDonald's Media Network began a pilot in 450 company operated US restaurants. Ads for other brands now appear on drive thru order boards once the customer has finished ordering. At the company's investor day on 23 September, global CMO Morgan Flatley set out an ambition to build the network into a billion dollar business across the McDonald's system over time.

The pilot is small, but the principle behind it is large. Retail media spent a decade proving that a store's customers are worth more as an audience than as passing trade. McDonald's is now testing whether the same logic holds for a restaurant, and every UK operator with screens, a loyalty app and a queue has reason to watch the result.

What McDonald's has actually launched

The confirmed inventory today is narrow: a share of the drive thru order board, shown after the order is placed, in roughly 3% of the US estate. The pilot covers 450 of around 14,000 US restaurants. Flatley's presentation pointed to a far wider footprint, from the app to kiosks, menu boards and dining rooms, but did not say which of those surfaces will carry outside advertising or when.

The assets behind the ambition are substantial. McDonald's serves more than 70 million customers a day across more than 46,000 restaurants. Its loyalty programme has nearly 220 million members active within a 90 day window, up 45% in three years, and active members visit 2.5 times as often as non members. Chief executive Chris Kempczinski put loyalty at about 30% of sales. That is the raw material every successful retail media network is built on: known customers, frequent visits and a record of what they buy.

Much of what a media buyer needs is still missing.

The franchise point decides the scale. The pilot runs only where McDonald's is the operator, and the company plans to own fewer restaurants, not more. A billion dollar network therefore depends on franchisees agreeing to carry the ads and on a revenue split that has not yet been published.

The timing also matters. US visits fell 4.5% year on year in the second quarter of 2026, according to Placer.ai, as lower income households cut back. A media network offers high margin revenue without selling another burger, which is exactly why it appeals when traffic softens, and exactly why its value depends on traffic holding up.

Why restaurants are the next frontier

Physical media networks have moved steadily from the supermarket aisle towards any venue with frequent visits and a known customer. Walmart's global advertising business reached nearly $6.4 billion in fiscal 2026, supported by 170,000 digital screens across more than 4,500 stores, and Walmart Connect grew 43% in its latest quarter. Convenience followed: in the US, 7-Eleven, Wawa and Circle K all run media networks, and 7-Eleven Australia is launching one across more than 760 stores.

Restaurants are the obvious next step because they combine three properties grocery stores struggle to match:

• Frequency. Quick service is a habit purchase. McDonald's loyalty members visit 2.5 times as often as other customers.
• Dwell. Customers wait for food after paying, often with nothing to look at but the screen in front of them. In UK pubs, Stonegate reports an average stay of 45 minutes in full view of its screens.
• Data. App ordering and loyalty schemes tie visits to identities, which allows campaigns to be targeted and, in theory, measured.

The UK already has proof of concept in hospitality. Stonegate's MiXR network runs around 4,500 screens across its managed pubs and reaches close to 100 million guest visits a year. In its 2023 pilot, drinks and snacks brands advertised in 100 venues and saw an average 15% unit sales uplift against a control group of 100 venues without screens.

There is one important difference between a restaurant and a supermarket. A grocer sells tens of thousands of products from hundreds of brands, all of whom are natural buyers of its media. A burger chain sells its own menu. Most of the demand for McDonald's screens will therefore come from brands it does not stock: insurers, streaming services, telecoms, entertainment and travel. In the investor day presentation, the example shown was an insurance ad. That makes restaurant media closer to digital out of home with a loyalty card attached than to classic retail media, and it changes how the inventory should be priced, bought and measured.

The UK picture

The UK is one of the most advanced markets for both retail media and digital out of home, and venue screens sit in the gap between them. The AA/WARC Expenditure Report forecasts total UK advertising of £50.5 billion in 2026. Retail media reached £3.7 billion in 2025 after growing 17.5%, rose 17.9% in the first quarter of 2026, and is forecast to grow 15.9% across the year and 13% in 2027.

That retail media figure covers a retailer's websites, apps and marketplaces. Screens inside a shop, a pub or a restaurant mostly sit elsewhere, closer to out of home, which is growing at a similar pace. Outsmart reports UK out of home revenue of £743.9 million in the first half of 2026, up 13.7%, with digital formats taking 68% of second quarter revenue. IAB UK puts 2025 digital out of home spend at a record £964 million and expects digital to reach 76% of the channel by 2031.

The largest UK venue networks today belong to grocers, convenience chains and pub groups.

McDonald's UK would enter from a position of strength. Comparable sales rose 7.8% in the first quarter of 2026, well ahead of the 3.9% recorded in the US, and the MyMcDonald's Rewards scheme already links app orders, kiosk codes and drive thru redemptions to individual customers.

The more interesting question for the UK is who follows. Any operator that combines high visit frequency, a captive wait and a working loyalty app holds the same three ingredients. That includes quick service and coffee chains with kiosks and app ordering, pub and bar groups, food and retail at railway stations and airports, and leisure venues such as cinemas and gyms. Tesco's move this month to run creator content across its in store screens shows how quickly the formats are maturing, and how much competition restaurant networks will face for the same budgets.

Footfall is not an audience

A busy venue is not automatically a valuable media channel. Footfall counts bodies through a door; an audience is footfall that can be described, reached on purpose and tied to an outcome. Five tests decide how much of a venue's traffic converts into saleable media.

1. Reach. How many different people pass the screens. McDonald's says it serves about 85% of the US population at least once a year, a reach figure few owned channels can match.
2. Frequency. How often the same people return. High frequency builds recall cheaply but needs frequency capping, which McDonald's has not yet described for customers who visit several times a week.
3. Attention. How long the screen is in view and what else competes for it. Research by IAS and Catalina found that 3 to 10 seconds in view was the range that drove incremental sales. A drive thru wait or a counter queue sits comfortably inside that window; a shopper walking past an aisle screen often does not. A Lumen study for Tesco measured 2.1 seconds of dwell on a single screen, doubling to 4.2 seconds when the same ad ran on two.
4. Identity. What share of visits is linked to a known customer. Loyalty accounts for about 30% of McDonald's sales, which leaves most transactions anonymous. Targeting for the majority of impressions will rely on context such as location, daypart and weather rather than personal data.
5. Proof. Whether the operator can show that an ad changed behaviour. This is straightforward for a drinks brand in a pub, where MiXR measured sales against control venues. It is hard for an insurer at a burger counter, because no purchase happens on the operator's side to close the loop.

The venues that score well on all five will command retail media prices. Those that score well only on reach and attention will be priced like digital out of home, which is still a good business but a different one. Most restaurant networks will start in the second group and move towards the first as app ordering, loyalty penetration and clean room partnerships mature.

The risks

The economics look attractive on paper, with Flatley describing revenue at little additional cost and no operational complexity. Five risks could still limit how far restaurant media scales.

• The customer experience. A menu board exists to sell food quickly. Every second given to another brand is a second taken from the operator's own offer, and customers notice. Writing in The Drum, Kristina Kaganer argued that these networks only work as a transparent value exchange, and asked what diners receive in return for their attention. McDonald's has so far placed ads after the order is complete, which suggests the company is aware of the line.
• Franchise politics. About 95% of McDonald's restaurants are franchised and the company is targeting 98% by the end of 2028. Franchisees own the screens customers see. Until a revenue split is agreed, the network cannot scale beyond company owned sites.
• Measurement. Industry standards do not map neatly onto a drive thru. The IAB in store framework divides inventory into exterior, entrance, checkout, aisles and other, and a drive thru order point is both outside the building and the till. For non endemic advertisers there is no sales record to prove incrementality, and screen networks such as Metcash in Australia have argued that judging them mainly on incremental sales keeps them out of brand budgets.
• Traffic. A media network is only as valuable as its visits. McDonald's US traffic fell through the second quarter of 2026, and the company expects industry traffic in its wholly owned markets to stay flat, with growth coming from market share.
• Data and privacy. UK and EU operators must build audience measurement that works without intrusive camera tracking, and must be clear with loyalty members about how their data informs advertising. McDonald's has not yet said whether loyalty data will be used to target or measure third party ads.

Outlook to 2029

Venue media will grow quickly, but from a small base, and the money will follow measurement rather than screen counts. Commerce media is forecast to pass $100 billion in the US by 2028, and global retail media reached $174 billion in 2025, according to WPP Media. In store formats remain a sliver of that. eMarketer expects US retail media spend of $74.4 billion this year, yet forecasts that in store retail media will not reach $1 billion until 2029. McDonald's alone is aiming for that figure over time, which shows how ambitious the target is.

In the UK, the April AA/WARC forecast put retail media at £4.2 billion in 2026 and £4.8 billion in 2027, and the July update raised the growth rate for both years. Digital out of home is expected to reach 76% of the out of home channel by 2031. Venue networks will draw on both pools.

Four developments look likely over the next three years.

1. Restaurant media will launch as contextual digital out of home and mature into data led retail media. Early inventory will be sold on location, daypart and wait time. Pricing based on known customers will follow as app ordering and loyalty take a larger share of transactions.
2. UK hospitality groups with managed estates will move faster than franchised chains. Stonegate built MiXR across venues it operates directly. A franchised network must first agree who owns the screen and who keeps the revenue, which slows the start.
3. Attention will become the pricing currency. Venues with a guaranteed wait, such as a drive thru lane, a coffee queue or a pub table, will charge more per impression than venues with passing traffic, provided they can evidence time in view.
4. Clean rooms will close the loop for non endemic advertisers. The networks that win insurance, streaming and telecom budgets will match screen exposure with partners' own sales data, as Uber already does through its clean room partnership with LiveRamp.

For media planning, the consequence is that venue networks will compete for both out of home and shopper marketing budgets, and will be judged on a mix of attention, reach and sales evidence rather than a single return on ad spend figure. For operators considering a network of their own, the order of work matters: audience measurement and an agreed lift method need to exist before the first rate card, because the first anchor advertisers will set the terms for everyone who follows.

McDonald's is not the first venue to sell its screens, but it is the first brand of its scale to test whether a restaurant visit can be packaged and sold as an audience. The answer will reprice every high footfall venue in the UK, whether or not it ever sells an ad.