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McDonald’s is expanding its digital customer data and restaurant space into its own advertising network. The company is currently testing the McDonald’s Media Network in 450 company-owned restaurants in the USA. As Marketing Dive reports from the Investor Day, the aim is to build an advertising business with a volume of 1 billion US dollars over the long term.
What makes this distinctive: McDonald’s is thinking of retail or commerce media not just as app advertising. Ads from other brands are meant to appear at several touchpoints – including the McDonald’s app, order kiosks, digital menu boards and restaurants. In doing so, the company combines digital identity, loyalty data and physical reach in its own media product.
From loyalty to advertising inventory
The foundation for this is large. McDonald’s currently cites almost 220 million active loyalty members within 90 days across 70 markets and more than 46.000 restaurants worldwide. At the same time, the company has in recent years further unified its data and technology architecture.
For advertisers, precisely this combination is interesting: McDonald’s knows transactions and loyalty behaviour and at the same time controls numerous digital and physical touchpoints around the purchase. This resembles developments already visible among traditional retailers and delivery platforms. DoorDash and Instacart are now also linking commerce data more closely with retail media, while Walmart continues to expand its data platform Scintilla.
McDonald’s wants to build a billion-dollar advertising business
Global CMO Morgan Flatley described commerce media at the Investor Day as one of the fastest-growing advertising areas. According to Marketing Dive, McDonald’s expects to grow its own network over the long term into a billion-dollar business.
The pilot initially runs in company-owned US restaurants. How quickly the media network will be extended to franchise locations or international markets remains open. For German advertisers, the offer is therefore not yet immediately bookable new inventory.
Strategically, the move is nonetheless relevant: McDonald’s is becoming a media provider itself and monetising the infrastructure originally built for ordering, loyalty and personalisation. This shifts retail media further beyond traditional retailers into food service, delivery and other commerce environments.
At the same time, McDonald’s is changing its marketing model
The media network is part of a broader restructuring. McDonald’s intends to use fewer short-term promotions in future and instead larger, longer-running programmes. Global campaigns are to be built more strongly on its own brand IP, fans and creators and then scaled across markets.
In parallel, McDonald’s is developing a unified global app platform called GMA One. It is to be tested first in France and then rolled out to further markets by the end of 2026 2028. The company describes the underlying architecture as a shared basis for ordering, marketing, loyalty and data – and explicitly as prepared for AI and new conversational commerce channels.
For marketers, this creates a pattern that points beyond McDonald’s: companies with high transaction volumes and their own customer relationships are increasingly trying to combine first-party data, media inventory and purchase measurement in one system. That is precisely why retail media is evolving from an additional advertising channel into a broader full-funnel infrastructure. Our analysis “Retail media becomes full-funnel” covers this further. The question of reliable impact measurement is also becoming more important, as the independent incrementality certification from DoorDash shows.