How consumers discover, evaluate, and order food has evolved tremendously in recent years thanks to an increasingly fragmented media landscape. With more channels, devices, and platforms than ever before, QSRs are challenged to find and reach customers where dining decisions happen across multiple environments throughout the day. This reality becomes clear when one examines today’s evolving media and consumption habits.
Let’s take a closer look:
Together, these data points highlight both the opportunity that new channels and devices present for QSR brands to connect with audiences and the growing challenge of reaching and influencing diners across fragmented touchpoints. Notably, more than 55% of QSR marketers report increasing customer engagement and loyalty as a top priority for their businesses. Yet as media formats, channels, and devices proliferate, standing apart—and driving loyalty—becomes increasingly difficult for QSR brands.
Today, ensuring sustained, relevant engagement across the right channels is critical to driving meaningful business results. QSRs must move beyond fragmented device and channel tactics and adopt a data-driven omnichannel strategy that enables them to get in front of the right audiences with the right message, on all the right devices. Learn how a leading QSR brand recently partnered with Cadent to do exactly that below.
A popular QSR brand set out to reach high-intent customers across connected TV (CTV) and complementary digital channels to drive awareness, measurable online orders, and maximize its media efficiency. For this leading quick-service brand, campaign success would require coordinated messaging across the entire customer journey, not isolated tactics on individual platforms. The brand needed to reach the right customers at the right moments in their customer journey, while proving direct impact on online orders.
Connected TV served as the foundation for the campaign strategy, as CTV provides the perfect combination of TV’s powerful storytelling through sight, sound, and motion with the unrivaled precision of digital. This pairing makes CTV a tremendous medium for driving everything from awareness to conversion. Moreover, recent findings indicate that CTV ads see 90-98% completion rates while delivering 23% higher ROI than traditional linear TV, highlighting the channel’s tremendous potential for driving business outcomes.
The brand worked closely with Cadent to customize predictive models aligned to the campaign’s KPIs, helping them identify and reach consumers most likely to place online orders after ad exposure. The predictive models analyzed millions of signals, including device behavior, location data, and contextual activity—scoring every impression opportunity in real time. To maximize awareness and drive full-funnel engagement, Cadent leveraged cross-device display banners to boost order efficiencies and reach consumers at different stages of their journey with relevant messaging. Moreover, with geo-targeting, Cadent helped the brand reach customers in key DMAs. With this predictive, geo-targeted, full-funnel approach, Cadent enabled the campaign to optimize spend efficiency, reaching customers likely to convert.
The campaign demonstrated how predictive models drive increasingly efficient performance. By using impression level campaign data to develop and continuously inform the custom predictive models, the campaign achieved:
These results showcase the power of cross-device advertising—and its potential to drive campaign performance when paired with predictive models and geo-targeting strategies. More importantly, these outcomes point to a broader shift in how QSR brands can connect upper-funnel media investment to measurable business results
The results from this campaign reflect broader industry trends toward measurable, performance-focused advertising in the Quick-Service Restaurant sector. For QSR brands, the imperative is clear: customers don't research and order on a single device, so advertising strategies cannot be confined to one screen. CTV serves as an efficient top-of-funnel driver that can be precisely measured and optimized for lower-funnel outcomes like online orders, while complementary digital channels ensure consistent presence throughout the buyer’s journey.
This campaign proved that precision and scale can work together. By leveraging data-driven targeting and coordinated cross-screen activation, QSR brands can reach hungry customers where they are, drive measurable online orders, and continuously improve efficiency through machine learning optimization. Restaurants that adopt predictive, cross-screen strategies will be positioned to acquire customers efficiently, maximize their advertising ROI, and measure results with confidence.