McDonald’s wants to turn its restaurants, screens, app and customer relationships into a billion-dollar advertising business. The bigger story for marketers is that retail media is rapidly becoming something much larger than retail, as every company with an audience starts asking the same dangerous question: why aren’t we selling ads too?
McDonald’s has spent decades figuring out how to sell more burgers, fries and Chicken McNuggets. Now it has identified another potentially lucrative product sitting inside its restaurants every day: the attention of its customers.
The company is building a media business that could eventually stretch across an ecosystem of digital surfaces, customer data and millions of daily interactions. At first glance, this looks like another company joining the retail media gold rush, but look more closely and McDonald’s represents something considerably more consequential.
Retail media is beginning to escape retail. Any company with enough customers, first-party data and control over the environments where those customers spend time can now plausibly imagine itself as a media company.
Everyone Is Becoming a Media Company
The original retail media proposition was relatively straightforward. Retailers knew what people bought, owned places where those people shopped and could sell advertisers access to both the audience and the moment of purchase.
That combination became incredibly powerful because it connected advertising with transaction data. The attraction wasn’t simply reaching a large audience, but reaching people who were actively making purchasing decisions and potentially measuring what happened afterward.
McDonald’s stretches that proposition into different territory. It isn’t a marketplace containing thousands of competing brands in the traditional sense, but it possesses many of the same ingredients that made retail media attractive in the first place.
It has enormous reach, frequent customer interactions, a massive loyalty ecosystem and an expanding collection of digital touchpoints. It also controls physical environments where millions of people spend several minutes looking at screens while completing one of the most predictable consumer behaviors imaginable.
Once viewed through the economics of modern advertising, that starts looking less like restaurant infrastructure and more like inventory. The distinction matters because thousands of other businesses are capable of making exactly the same discovery.
Your Customer Base Is Apparently a Media Product Now
For decades, the physical footprint of a company such as McDonald’s was primarily understood as distribution infrastructure. Restaurants existed to prepare food, serve customers and generate transactions, while the screens and systems inside them existed to make those transactions easier.
Digital media economics encourages companies to look at that infrastructure differently. Every screen becomes potential inventory, every customer interaction becomes a potential signal and every repeated behavior becomes something that can potentially be packaged for advertisers.
That reframing reaches far beyond fast food. Airlines have passengers and seatback screens, hotels have guests and booking platforms, banks have customers and apps, fitness companies have members and connected equipment, while automakers increasingly have drivers sitting inside rolling collections of digital displays.
Each possesses some combination of identity, attention, behavioral information, transaction data and controlled environments. Assemble enough of those ingredients and somebody inside the company will eventually discover a media business hiding in the spreadsheet.
This is where the next stage of commerce media becomes considerably more interesting than retailers launching advertising divisions. We are entering an era in which almost every sufficiently large consumer business has an economic incentive to ask whether its customer relationship can become an advertising product.
First-Party Data Has Created a Strange Incentive
Marketers spent years preparing for a world in which first-party data would become increasingly valuable. Companies invested heavily in loyalty programs, apps, customer databases and authenticated experiences because knowing their own customers promised a strategic advantage in an increasingly fragmented digital ecosystem.
There is an unintended consequence to that strategy. Once a company has assembled a large authenticated audience, monetizing access to that audience begins to look financially irresistible.
A loyalty program can therefore undergo a subtle transformation. What began as a mechanism for strengthening the relationship between customer and brand can become infrastructure for monetizing that relationship through other advertisers.
Once a company has assembled a large authenticated audience, monetizing access to that audience begins to look financially irresistible.
Those goals are not necessarily incompatible, but neither are they automatically compatible. There is a meaningful difference between using customer information to make McDonald’s more relevant and using the McDonald’s customer relationship to make somebody else’s advertising more relevant.
That distinction will become increasingly important as commerce media expands into more categories. The industry has spent enormous amounts of time discussing whether advertising is sufficiently personalized, while considerably less attention has been paid to whether every possible moment actually needs advertising in the first place.
The Drive-Thru Is Not Instagram
McDonald’s possesses something many digital publishers would love to have: an environment it completely controls. There is no algorithm deciding whether a customer encounters the ordering screen, while the physical experience provides something considerably closer to guaranteed exposure than most digital advertising environments can promise.
That makes these surfaces unusually attractive, but it also creates responsibility. A person opening a social platform understands that advertising is part of the bargain, while someone pulling into a drive-thru believes they are ordering lunch.
McDonald’s possesses something many digital publishers would love to have: an environment it completely controls.
Those expectations matter because media isn’t simply a collection of available surfaces. Context determines whether advertising feels useful, tolerable or invasive, and turning a screen into inventory changes the implicit purpose of that screen.
There is an obvious version of the McDonald’s media business that works beautifully. Relevant brands appear naturally around particular occasions, messages complement rather than interrupt the customer experience and advertising feels like an extension of an environment rather than something bolted onto it.
There is another version in which every available screen becomes monetized because somebody calculated that it could be. The distinction between those outcomes will determine whether McDonald’s has created genuinely valuable media or simply discovered another place to put advertisements.
Retail Media Has an Inventory Problem Coming
The broader advertising industry should pay attention because McDonald’s is joining an increasingly crowded field. Retailers, delivery platforms, financial services companies, travel businesses and other consumer-facing organizations are discovering that their audiences can be monetized.
That sounds like an abundance of opportunity for marketers, but abundance has a habit of becoming clutter. If every company becomes a media network, advertisers will eventually confront hundreds of supposedly unique pools of first-party data, each accompanied by proprietary measurement systems, audience definitions, buying interfaces and claims of closed-loop attribution.
The fragmentation problem that plagued digital advertising could simply be rebuilt inside commerce media under different branding. Instead of consolidating the advertising ecosystem, the industry may be creating another sprawling collection of walled gardens.
The fragmentation problem that plagued digital advertising could simply be rebuilt inside commerce media under different branding.
Marketers therefore need to become considerably more skeptical about the phrase “first-party data.” Owning customer information does not automatically create compelling advertising inventory, just as owning a screen does not automatically create a meaningful media environment.
The important question isn’t whether a company can sell advertising against its audience. Increasingly, the question is whether marketers have a legitimate reason to be there and whether customers gain anything from their presence.
McDonald’s Has Something Most Media Networks Don’t
There is nevertheless something unusually interesting about the McDonald’s proposition. The company doesn’t merely possess reach; it possesses an extraordinary collection of repeatable consumer occasions.
People visit McDonald’s during road trips, lunch breaks, school runs, late nights, commutes and countless other recognizable moments. Those occasions contain contextual information that can potentially be more useful than another generic demographic audience segment.
The company doesn’t merely possess reach; it possesses an extraordinary collection of repeatable consumer occasions.
That creates opportunities for advertisers to think differently about targeting. Instead of simply asking who the customer is, marketers can think about what the customer is doing, what need they are satisfying and what might logically matter next.
Done properly, that could make commerce media more contextual rather than merely more targeted. Done badly, it becomes another excuse to follow people through their lives with increasingly precise advertisements.
The difference will depend on whether marketers treat these environments as audiences to exploit or moments to understand. That distinction may eventually separate genuinely useful commerce media from the enormous amount of mediocre inventory likely to appear as more companies enter the market.
The Customer Relationship Is Not Free Inventory
There is a deeper strategic tension underneath the entire commerce media boom. Companies spent decades and billions of dollars building trusted relationships with customers, and advertising now offers them an opportunity to monetize those relationships in entirely new ways.
That does not mean the value is unlimited. Every additional advertisement consumes a small amount of attention and potentially a small amount of goodwill, while a screen that previously existed exclusively to help someone complete a task changes subtly when another company pays to occupy part of it.
Every additional advertisement consumes a small amount of attention and potentially a small amount of goodwill.
This is especially important for brands such as McDonald’s because their scale is partly built on familiarity and simplicity. The restaurant experience works because customers understand the transaction immediately, and introducing an advertising marketplace into that environment cannot be allowed to make the underlying experience worse.
The smartest media businesses will understand restraint as part of the product. Scarcity can make inventory more valuable, relevance can make advertising feel less intrusive and protecting the customer experience can preserve the very audience advertisers are paying to reach.
Soon, Every Brand Will Ask the McDonald’s Question
McDonald’s has the scale, physical footprint, digital engagement and customer relationships required to build a substantial advertising business. The more significant development for marketers, however, is the precedent represented by the decision and the questions it creates for almost every other large consumer brand.
The boundaries between advertiser, retailer, publisher and media owner are collapsing. Companies that once purchased audiences are discovering that they own audiences of their own, while businesses that once regarded screens, apps and loyalty programs as operational infrastructure are beginning to see media inventory.
Advertising has historically been very good at finding new places where an ad can exist, while demonstrating considerably less discipline about deciding whether an ad should exist there.
That creates enormous opportunity, but it also risks turning every consumer interaction into a monetization opportunity. Advertising has historically been very good at finding new places where an ad can exist, while demonstrating considerably less discipline about deciding whether an ad should exist there.
McDonald’s may have discovered an entirely new revenue stream hiding inside the Golden Arches. If the rest of corporate America follows, marketers will need to remember that possessing someone’s attention and having permission to monetize it are two very different things.