Planet Fitness is shifting the balance between national brand control and location-level responsibility. How that balance plays out could offer a useful lesson on how strengthen local execution at scale.

Planet Fitness is considering transferring more company-operated clubs to franchisees while directing a larger share of required marketing spending toward national advertising. Together, the moves test whether a brand can give operators more responsibility for individual locations while retaining greater control of the marketing intended to attract customers.

Planet Fitness has begun reviewing the possible sale of some of its approximately 280 company-operated U.S. clubs to new or existing franchisees. The company wants corporate ownership to remain below 10% of its network.

Franchisees already operate approximately 90% of Planet Fitness’s 2,962 clubs. They were responsible for 25 of the 33 locations opened during the third quarter, serving a system that now includes approximately 21.5 million members.

More locations will rely on franchisees

Transferring clubs to franchisees puts more responsibility for staffing, service, member acquisition and community relationships in the hands of local operators. It can also bring decision-making closer to individual markets, where franchisees may understand local competitors, customer routines and potential partnerships better than a national corporate team.

Planet Fitness works primarily with experienced multi-unit operators. At the end of 2025, 98% of its franchised clubs belonged to groups operating at least three locations. The company had 86 franchise groups, with its largest operating 208 clubs.

These are not isolated business owners working without centralized support. Many are regional organizations with their own management teams, market knowledge and local media experience. As they add clubs, Planet Fitness will need to ensure that their location-level insight remains connected to national strategy.

Marketing is moving toward the national level

While franchisees may operate more clubs, Planet Fitness is centralizing a larger share of marketing. Franchisees voted to increase their National Advertising Fund contribution from 2% to 3% of membership dues in 2026, while required local marketing spending declined from 7% to 6%. The total commitment remained the same, but one percentage point moved from local activity to national campaigns.

The national fund supports brand awareness, media partnerships and creative materials that locations can use during promotional periods. Local budgets fund tactics such as digital advertising, direct mail, outdoor media, sponsorships and community partnerships. Planet Fitness can also organize regional advertising cooperatives when several operators share a market.

The change gives Planet Fitness more resources to deliver a consistent national message. That can help individual clubs, particularly when campaigns reinforce widely recognized positioning such as affordability and the “Judgement Free Zone.”

Customers, however, do not join a national network in the abstract. They choose a nearby club based on its location, hours, equipment, cleanliness, reviews and overall experience. National media may create interest, but individual clubs still need to convert that interest into visits and memberships.

With a smaller percentage allocated to local marketing, franchisees and their agencies will need to use those dollars more selectively. A mature club in a well-established market may require a different approach than a new location building awareness or a club facing aggressive local competition.

Connecting national campaigns with local demand

Planet Fitness has an opportunity to measure how national campaigns perform across different club types and trade areas. Systemwide membership growth alone will not show whether media is supporting the locations that need it most.

The company can examine whether campaigns generate searches, website visits, trial offers and new memberships around individual clubs. It can also compare results between established markets, expansion territories and locations transferred from corporate management to franchisees.

Regional cooperatives could become increasingly important as more clubs move into franchisee hands. They allow multiple locations to coordinate around a shared media market while adapting national campaigns to local conditions. They also provide a middle ground between every operator acting independently and every club receiving identical marketing.

Planet Fitness is building a system in which franchisees may control more of the physical customer experience while the company controls more of the advertising message. Those approaches can work together if national campaigns create measurable local demand and operators retain enough flexibility to address the conditions surrounding their clubs.

Planet Fitness’s challenge will be ensuring that a larger national voice still helps each club compete in its own local market.

Attain’s integration brings purchases made beyond Amazon into its advertising platform, opening another route to CTV audiences.

Amazon’s advertising appeal extends beyond brands selling through its marketplace. An expanded integration with Attain now lets advertisers use purchases made elsewhere to build audiences directly within Amazon Ads DVA+, including for campaigns running on Prime Video.

The integration, announced by Attain, makes its purchase-based audiences natively available in Amazon’s buying platform. Advertisers can segment consumers by retailer, combinations of retailers, purchase category, and whether spending occurred online or in stores. Attain says those signals refresh daily.

For restaurant chains, retailers, automotive businesses and hospitality brands, the development connects CTV buying with shopping behavior beyond a single retailer’s customer base. Its practical value will depend on how those audiences align with the markets and customers a brand can serve.

Different Routes to CTV Audiences

Retailer-specific data provides insight into purchases within that business. As Magnite’s work with Walmart Connect and Best Buy Ads illustrates, those shopper relationships can extend into television inventory through established buying platforms. Attain brings a cross-retailer perspective into Amazon’s platform, allowing audience selection to reflect spending across multiple businesses.

Other approaches build audiences from viewing context rather than recorded transactions. Magnite’s expanded Proximic partnership brings predictive audiences and ID-free contextual targeting into SpringServe, helping publishers package relevant CTV inventory. A predicted category buyer, however, is not the same as someone with a recorded purchase.

For MULO brands and their agencies, those audience definitions influence planning. Cross-retailer information could help distinguish customers loyal to one retailer from those shopping across several, while contextual targeting could uncover additional prospects. Marketers need to understand what each signal establishes, audience overlap and the additional reach each approach provides.

The relevance also depends on geography. A national category audience may be too broad for a regional footprint. Purchase signals become more useful when combined with appropriate market coverage, creative and offers available at nearby locations.

Moving Data Into Execution

Attain and Amazon already had a measurement relationship. In 2025, Attain became an automated offline sales-lift measurement partner of the former Amazon DSP. The new integration moves its purchase intelligence into audience activation.

Attain collects permissioned data through financial-wellness and shopping-rewards apps. The company says it has direct relationships with more than 14 million consumers.

“The real opportunity today isn’t just better intelligence, it’s removing the friction between insight and execution,” said Ben Grossman, managing director, Applied AI Strategy at Publicis Groupe.

For agencies, native availability can reduce the distance between choosing an audience and activating a campaign. That matters when teams manage multiple brands, markets and promotional calendars. It also gives brand advertisers whose transactions happen outside Amazon another reason to consider its media offering.

Connecting Audiences With Results

Purchase-based targeting provides evidence of past behavior. Marketers still need to separate customers likely to buy anyway from those influenced by a campaign, while maintaining enough audience scale within their service areas to deliver efficiently.

For multi-location brands, evaluation should account for customer density, competitive conditions, store availability and promotional participation. National results can obscure those differences.

Attain’s integration expands the shopping signals advertisers can activate through Amazon’s media platform. For brand marketers, its value lies in translating that broader view of customer spending into more precise audience and investment decisions across the locations they serve.

Foodtastic’s proposed acquisition of MTY Food Group could bring more than 100 restaurant brands under one owner, creating opportunities for shared technology, marketing and operations. 

The proposed Foodtastic acquisition of MTY Food Group could reshape the operating model behind more than 4,100 U.S. restaurants. The larger question is whether a company overseeing more than 100 concepts could create useful scale without making distinct brands look and operate alike.

MTY has rejected Foodtastic’s unsolicited proposal and formally ended discussions. The dispute puts new attention on a portfolio that includes Cold Stone Creamery, Papa Murphy’s, Wetzel’s Pretzels, Pinkberry and Planet Smoothie. MTY operates 6,966 locations under more than 80 banners, including approximately 4,100 in the United States.

Foodtastic argues that MTY acquired too many concepts without generating sufficient organic growth. MTY maintains that its independent plan, focused on efficiency, simplification and a more asset-light model, offers the better path forward. Behind the disagreement is a familiar challenge for multi-brand operators: What should be centralized, and what must remain close to each brand and local market?

Where Scale Could Help

MTY’s brands span quick service, fast casual and casual dining. They serve different occasions, operate through different formats and depend on different customer journeys. Cold Stone Creamery, Papa Murphy’s and Wetzel’s Pretzels may share a parent company, but their approaches to site selection, loyalty, digital ordering and local advertising should not be interchangeable.

Foodtastic already manages approximately 30 brands and nearly 1,200 locations, including Freshii, Pita Pit, Milestones and Second Cup. Combining the companies would create a restaurant group with more than 100 concepts and roughly 8,000 locations.

That scale could support stronger shared capabilities. Purchasing, payments, data governance and core technology are areas where consolidation may reduce duplication. Smaller brands could gain access to digital ordering, analytics and franchise-development resources that would be expensive to build independently—an approach also visible in how multi-brand restaurant groups are turning shared capabilities into an operating platform.

Common reporting could help management identify declining traffic, weak offer performance or franchisee challenges by market and location. Consolidated media buying might improve rates, while shared customer data could support more effective acquisition and retention programs.

However, shared systems should not produce identical customer experiences. A portfolio-wide loyalty platform could expand reach, but each brand would still need relevant offers, rewards and communications. As CKE’s approach to scaling local marketing demonstrates, centralized technology and brand controls can coexist with execution that varies by region, market and location.

Franchisees Will Feel the Strategy Locally

For U.S. franchisees, the practical effects of any transaction would appear through marketing-fund decisions, technology requirements, supplier relationships and the support available to their brands.

A larger organization might negotiate better purchasing terms and provide more sophisticated marketing tools. It could also create additional distance between franchisees and the people making decisions about their concepts. That risk is especially significant for smaller banners competing for attention within a portfolio of more than 100 brands.

Brand prioritization would be unavoidable. Some concepts may receive investment for expansion, technology or refreshed marketing. Others could be sold, consolidated or allowed to contract. Even without immediate restaurant closures, reduced marketing and slower development can gradually weaken local visibility.

The strongest operating model would centralize capabilities that clearly benefit from scale while keeping positioning, menu strategy, local marketing and franchisee engagement close to each concept. It would also establish transparent criteria for deciding which brands receive investment and how operators contribute to those decisions.

Foodtastic’s proposal remains conditional, and MTY has rejected it. Regardless of who ultimately owns the company, the portfolio must become easier to operate without becoming less responsive to customers and franchisees.

The broader lesson is that multi-brand scale creates value only when it makes individual concepts more competitive. If consolidation leads to standardized experiences, diluted local marketing and weaker franchisee support, a larger portfolio becomes more complicated without becoming more effective.

Choice Hotels is applying AI across more of the hotel customer journey, from discovery and group sales to pricing, reviews and property operations. Its latest results suggest the company sees these tools as part of a connected commercial system designed to generate demand while improving franchisee economics.

The strategy arrives as Choice works to restore domestic unit growth. The company’s U.S. room count was approximately flat year over year in the third quarter, but room exits declined 23%. U.S. openings increased 17% during the first nine months of 2026, while the conversion pipeline grew 29%. Choice also reported a 3.8% increase in U.S. revenue per available room, driven by gains in both occupancy and rates.

Those figures do not prove that AI produced the improvement. They do, however, provide the commercial context for Choice’s technology investments. The company is using AI to help individual hotels become easier to discover, convert more demand and operate more efficiently—all of which can affect whether owners remain with the system or add another Choice Hotels property.

Preparing Hotels for AI Discovery

Choice says visits to ChoiceHotels.com originating directly from large language models increased more than tenfold year over year during the quarter. The volume remains a small percentage of total website traffic, but the increase supports the company’s decision to enrich its digital property content as travelers begin using AI assistants to research accommodations.

For a hotel franchise, visibility in AI search depends on more than the strength of the national brand. An assistant needs reliable information about each property’s location, amenities, room types, availability and nearby attractions. Incomplete or inconsistent property content can make an otherwise relevant hotel difficult for an AI platform to recommend.

Choice’s response resembles local-search optimization, but for a discovery environment that may answer a question without sending the traveler to a conventional results page. The company is attempting to make its property information understandable to those systems while preserving a path to direct booking.

The risk is that more AI visibility does not necessarily give Choice Hotels greater control of the traveler. An assistant may recommend a hotel but direct the booking through an online travel agency or another intermediary. Choice will need to measure not only referrals from large language models, but also whether those interactions produce direct bookings, loyalty enrollments and profitable stays.

Connecting Discovery Conversion

Choice is also applying AI further down the funnel. Its EasyBid platform helps hotel owners respond to requests for group business, a category that can be particularly valuable to properties serving corporate travel, sports teams and local events. Management said the tool improved request-for-proposal win rates by 210 basis points and supported a 27% increase in group revenue during the quarter.

That is a more concrete use of AI than adding a chatbot to a customer-facing website. EasyBid is intended to help an individual hotel evaluate and convert demand it might otherwise miss, connecting centralized technology with location-level revenue.

Choice is taking a similar approach to pricing. Its RAIZ revenue-management platform combines pricing, inventory and channel management, giving franchisees a way to adjust rates without relying entirely on manual decisions. Meanwhile, an AI-assisted reputation-management tool reportedly reduced related franchisee fees by approximately 30%. Choice is also expanding Charlie, an AI tool within its property-management system that handles routine operating tasks.

Together, the products cover several parts of a hotel’s commercial operation: attracting demand, responding to leads, setting prices, managing reviews and reducing administrative work. The value comes from how those functions reinforce one another, not simply from the number of AI products deployed.

Loyalty Remains the Connective Layer

Choice Privileges gives the company a way to identify travelers after discovery and engage them across its portfolio. The program reached 78 million members, an increase of 7%, while loyalty members’ share of revenue rose by more than 140 basis points. Choice also said new members generated 12% more revenue per person than comparable members added a year earlier.

That first-party relationship becomes more valuable as discovery fragments across AI assistants, online travel agencies, search engines and travel platforms. Choice Hotels may not control where a traveler begins planning, but loyalty can give it a stronger role in subsequent bookings and provide the data needed to personalize future offers.

The challenge is making the system work consistently across independently operated hotels. AI-generated demand has limited value if property details are inaccurate, group requests go unanswered, pricing is poorly aligned with local conditions or the guest experience fails to meet expectations. Choice will need common data standards and performance measures while giving owners enough flexibility to respond to their markets.

Choice’s AI strategy is therefore best understood as a franchise growth strategy. Better discovery can introduce travelers to individual hotels; EasyBid and RAIZ can help properties convert and price that demand, reputation tools can strengthen local credibility, and loyalty can turn a single stay into an ongoing customer relationship. The longer-term measure is not how many AI products Choice Hotels deploys. It will be whether individual hotels attract more profitable bookings, deliver better guest experiences and give owners a stronger reason to remain and grow within the Choice system

Multi-location businesses have historically relied on local search visibility to drive website traffic. But as Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, along with Ai Search assistants like ChatGPT and Gemini, answer more local questions directly, customers increasingly choose businesses without visiting their websites.

This creates a measurement challenge: declining website traffic doesn’t necessarily mean declining customer interest. Multi-location businesses need to look beyond clicks to understand where AI recommends their locations, how it describes them, and whether customers can easily act on those recommendations. Winning these customers also requires ensuring locations are easy for AI agents to interact with when customers want to take action.

Track AI Visibility Across Every Location

A multi-location brand can have strong overall visibility in AI search while individual locations remain largely absent from the answers customers receive. AI recommendations depend on the query, the customer’s location, and the sources each platform draws on, so a brand’s presence in one market doesn’t guarantee visibility in another.

Track where your locations appear across Google’s AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, and other assistants. Test relevant queries across each location’s trade area. Tools like Local Falcon can monitor local AI visibility by location, revealing where you appear and which competitors are recommended instead.

But tracking mentions only reveals part of the picture. AI-generated answers also shape how customers perceive a business before they visit or contact a location. If an assistant describes one location as highly rated and convenient but flags another for recurring complaints, those differences can influence a customer’s choice.

AI brand sentiment analysis helps multi-location businesses understand how AI describes their brand and individual locations, including whether those descriptions are favorable, neutral, or negative. That insight can help teams identify recurring problems, investigate the sources behind inaccurate claims, and understand how customer perceptions vary across markets.

Optimize for Google’s AI Search Experiences First

Google remains a priority for local search, and its generative AI experiences draw on many of the same signals that influence traditional local search visibility. Across dozens, hundreds, or thousands of locations, outdated hours, inconsistent service information, missing attributes, and inaccurate location pages can prevent AI from confidently communicating what each business offers.

Ensure each location’s website page reinforces its Google Business Profile with accurate service details, location-specific information, and answers to common customer questions.

Reviews deserve particular attention because they help shape how AI summarizes a specific business location. Establish consistent review-generation and response processes across locations, while giving local teams a way to address recurring complaints that corporate-level reporting might overlook.

Make Every Location Ready for AI Agents

AI search is changing what happens after discovery. Google is introducing AI-powered features that help users book services and make reservations through integrated partners, while agentic commerce is enabling assistants to navigate websites and help customers complete transactions.

For multi-location businesses, website visitors may increasingly include AI agents checking availability, confirming services, or facilitating bookings on customers’ behalf.

AI agents must be able to access information and interact reliably with website controls. Google’s web.dev guidance emphasizes semantic HTML and accessible page structures. Multi-location brands should apply these principles across their location pages.

Key steps include:

• Use clear, accessible website controls: Build booking, ordering, and contact flows around properly labeled links, buttons, and form fields, with obvious actions for submitting requests.
• Make location information available as text: Display hours, services, pricing, policies, and other essential details directly on the page rather than relying on images or downloadable documents.
• Test key customer journeys: Check whether users and assistive technologies can navigate location pages, identify available services, and complete important actions without unnecessary friction.
• Connect to appropriate booking and ordering platforms: Where supported, ensure each location’s profile and website direct customers into the correct booking or ordering flow.

These improvements also benefit human customers, making accessibility and clear information worthwhile investments even before agentic commerce becomes widespread.

Measure Visibility and Actions Beyond Website Traffic

Website sessions and click-through rates cannot capture every interaction that begins with an AI search. Combine location-level AI visibility tracking and sentiment analysis with business outcomes, including calls, direction requests, bookings, and orders. Use appropriately configured analytics and campaign tracking to attribute website visits and conversions to individual location profiles and booking links where possible.

Compare performance across locations and over time to identify markets gaining AI visibility, locations losing ground to competitors, and gaps between recommendations and customer actions.

The goal is to connect discovery with action without assuming every conversion will produce a website session. A location that rarely appears in relevant AI-generated answers may need stronger visibility, while one that is frequently recommended but generates few customer actions may have a problem with its offering, information, or conversion experience.

Turn Every Location Into an AI-Ready Destination

For multi-location businesses, zero-click search is not simply a reason to rethink website traffic reporting. It’s a reason to manage local visibility and customer action together.

Every location needs to appear in relevant AI-generated answers, earn persuasive descriptions that reflect its strengths, and provide a reliable path to a call, booking, order, or visit. That requires location-level visibility monitoring, consistent local search optimization, and digital experiences that work for both people and the AI agents increasingly helping them make decisions.

VIOOH’s partnership with Adams Outdoor brings more than 460 digital billboards across 14 states into its marketplace, expanding access to regional audiences and commuter corridors.

VIOOH is expanding its U.S. digital out-of-home (DOOH) footprint through a partnership with Adams Outdoor Advertising, bringing more than 460 digital billboards across 14 states into its programmatic marketplace.

The agreement makes Adams Outdoor’s inventory, representing more than 4.9 billion monthly impressions, accessible through VIOOH’s supply-side platform. The billboards span major highways, commuter corridors and high-traffic roadways across the Southeast, Midwest and Northeast.

The partnership simplifies MULO brand access to regional outdoor inventory while providing greater flexibility in campaign planning and execution.

Expanding Access to Regional DOOH Inventory

Adams Outdoor’s network spans established and growing markets, including Charlotte, Detroit, Pittsburgh and Raleigh-Durham. The expanded access gives multi-location advertisers a way to coordinate regional campaigns, support market-specific promotions and reach consumers along major commuter corridors.

The partnership also introduces Adams Outdoor’s inventory to additional advertising demand through VIOOH’s marketplace, extending its sales opportunities beyond traditional direct buying relationships.

“Billboard advertising built Adams Outdoor’s reputation over decades, and this partnership brings that same trusted, high-impact inventory into VIOOH’s programmatic marketplace,” said Gavin Wilson, global chief commercial officer at VIOOH.

Simplifying Multi-Market Outdoor Campaigns

Traditional outdoor advertising often requires advertisers to negotiate placements, schedules and pricing across individual media owners. That process becomes more complicated when campaigns span multiple markets and regional operators.

VIOOH’s platform enables buyers to incorporate Adams Outdoor’s inventory into broader media plans, using geographic, audience and contextual data to inform campaign decisions.

For agencies managing multi-location brands, the ability to coordinate outdoor placements across regional markets can reduce operational complexity. Campaigns can be tailored to local priorities, including store openings, seasonal promotions, competitive markets and regional brand-building initiatives.

Josh Scharfberg, chief revenue officer at Adams Outdoor, said the partnership combines the company’s regional presence with VIOOH’s technology to make its expanding digital network more accessible to advertisers.

The partnership also reflects a seemingly broader shift among outdoor media owners toward making established billboard networks available through digital buying platforms.

Greater Access Still Requires Better Measurement

Expanding available inventory addresses one challenge facing DOOH advertisers, but measurement remains an important consideration. We previously examined how programmatic DOOH is still purchased differently from digital advertising, including differences in buying practices, inventory availability and campaign measurement.

While the VIOOH–Adams Outdoor agreement expands the range of billboards available to buyers, neither company has disclosed advertiser adoption, campaign performance or measurable business outcomes associated with the integration.

The reported 4.9 billion monthly impressions represent estimated audience exposure across the network rather than verified store visits, sales or other advertiser results. Understanding whether billboard exposure contributes to local business outcomes remains central to determining campaign value.

Regional Reach With Broader Buying Access

For Adams Outdoor, the partnership creates another distribution channel for its established billboard network. For VIOOH, it strengthens U.S. coverage in regional markets where local presence and commuter traffic can play an important role in advertising strategy.

The broader opportunity is for brands to incorporate regional outdoor media into coordinated campaigns without adding the same level of market-by-market buying complexity. Whether that translates into increased brand investment will depend on the ability to demonstrate results beyond audience reach, particularly for brands seeking measurable performance across hundreds of locations.

Magnite’s expanded partnership with Proximic by Comscore brings predictive audience targeting into SpringServe. The announcement coincides with its Street Fight LIVE discussion of how marketers can evaluate CTV across the customer journey.

Finding relevant connected-TV audiences and understanding their response remain separate challenges for advertisers. Magnite is expanding its targeting capabilities as brand marketers seek a clearer connection between television exposure and subsequent customer actions.

An expanded partnership announced October 28 brings Proximic by Comscore’s predictive audiences, contextual intelligence and ID-free activation into Magnite’s SpringServe video platform. Publishers can use the integration to package CTV inventory, including pause ads, around audience signals.

The same day, Magnite participated in Street Fight LIVE in Philadelphia. Magnite’s,  SVP Advanced Solutions, Matt McLeggon,  joined Arpeggio’s CRO , Amber Daniel, for “Beyond the Last Click: Making CTV Part of the Full Customer Journey,” a session focused on connecting touchpoints across streaming, search, social and other channels.

The session’s focus provides a useful framework for evaluating the announcement. Reaching a relevant audience creates an opportunity; determining how that exposure contributes to customer behavior establishes its business value.

Building Audiences From Viewing Context

Proximic combines audience and contextual signals to predict where consumers are likely to engage. The approach enables targeting without relying on individual identifiers.

Future Today is among the first publishers using the integration. It combines first-party viewership data with contextual signals to create seasonal audience packages, including prospects for allergy medicine and Halloween candy.

For buyers, those examples illustrate the opportunity to find potential customers beyond an existing database. They also require careful interpretation: a predicted candy buyer is not necessarily a verified purchaser, and contextual relevance does not establish purchase intent.Brands and agencies should understand what informs each segment, how it is validated and whether it reaches people their other campaigns miss. Those answers help determine the audience’s role within a broader media plan.

Another Route to Relevant Reach

Magnite’s role in retail media’s expansion into CTV has centered partly on connecting retailer audiences with television inventory. The Proximic integration adds a complementary approach, helping publishers package inventory using predictive and contextual intelligence. These approaches support different planning needs. Retailer purchase data reflects established shopping behavior. Predictive targeting offers another way to identify potentially relevant advertising opportunities without requiring the same individual-level connection.

Buyers can evaluate them alongside one another, comparing audience overlap, cost and additional reach. Treating their signals as interchangeable would obscure what each actually reveals about the customer.

Embedding audience intelligence within SpringServe makes that packaging part of the publisher’s existing selling process. For brand advertisers, the benefit depends on whether the resulting offerings are understandable and accessible through their buying workflows.

Connecting Audience Relevance With Local Results

Multi-location campaigns require more than audience relevance. Advertising must reach markets where products or services are available, with timing and creative suited to local demand. An allergy-medicine campaign, for example, could coordinate seasonal messaging with participating stores and inventory. That is a potential application, not a demonstrated outcome of this integration. The announcement does not detail geographic targeting options or store-level sales measurement.

Timeliness also affects campaign value. Research on retail-media execution speed underscores the importance of activating audiences and receiving usable reporting while an opportunity remains relevant. The companies have not quantified time savings or campaign lift from the integration.

Magnite is giving publishers more ways to connect their inventory with advertiser demand. Brands and their agencies should evaluate those audiences within the full customer journey, using incremental reach and business outcomes to guide investment across the markets they serve.

McDonald’s decision to end its FIFA sponsorship reflects a broader U.S. marketing reset. The company is placing greater value on loyalty, customer data and programs that can produce measurable restaurant visits.

McDonald’s will end its FIFA World Cup sponsorship after the 2026 tournament, concluding a relationship that began in 1994. The decision follows its largest global marketing campaign to date, which reached more than 100 markets but did not produce the expected business results.

The bigger story for U.S. multi-location brands is not the loss of a global sports property. It is McDonald’s acknowledgement that broad cultural visibility must do more to produce identifiable customers, repeat visits and measurable restaurant activity.

Global CMO Morgan Flatley said the company had become overly dependent on “borrowed IP”—the sports, entertainment franchises and celebrities that give brands access to established audiences. McDonald’s plans to use those partnerships more selectively while investing more heavily in brand assets and customer relationships it controls.

Reach Is Not the Same as Restaurant Traffic

Large sponsorships can generate attention that would be difficult for a brand to create independently. But they are expensive, temporary and often difficult to connect with individual purchases.

McDonald’s U.S. comparable sales increased only 0.8% during the quarter that included the opening phase of its World Cup campaign. That result does not prove the sponsorship failed, but it illustrates the difficulty of converting mass-market visibility into incremental restaurant traffic.

For a U.S. chain with thousands of locations, national awareness is only one measure of performance. Marketing must also help determine which markets gained visits, whether an offer produced profitable transactions and whether first-time customers returned. Those questions become more important when franchisees fund portions of the marketing program and absorb the operating costs associated with promotions.

Loyalty Creates Better Customer Signals

McDonald’s is building a more direct engagement model through its loyalty program. The company plans to introduce tiers that reward participation and encourage less frequent customers to return.

Loyalty members already account for approximately 30% of McDonald’s sales and visit 2.5 times as often as other customers. The chain has also identified roughly 150 million infrequent members who could be reactivated through personalized challenges, early product access, faster points accumulation and other benefits.

Unlike a broad sponsorship, a loyalty interaction can be connected with a customer account and transaction. McDonald’s can measure whether an offer changed visit frequency, which products generated a response and whether the customer returned to the same restaurant or another location.

That information can also make national marketing more useful locally. Offers can reflect regional demand, customer behavior or restaurant capacity without abandoning a consistent brand message.

Franchisees Need More Than Impressions

The shift is particularly relevant to franchised businesses. Corporate marketing can generate interest, but franchisees deliver the food, staffing, speed and service that shape the customer’s experience. Owned programs give operators clearer evidence of how marketing affects their restaurants. Redemption, repeat visits and average transaction value can be evaluated by market or location instead of relying primarily on campaign reach and national sales.

McDonald’s has separately outlined an $8.5 billion plan to support franchisees through 2036 as it invests in restaurant operations, automation and hospitality. Those improvements support its marketing strategy. Personalized offers will not strengthen loyalty if long waits, order errors or inconsistent service weaken the resulting visit.

The company must also ensure that loyalty promotions work economically for operators. A program that increases traffic through aggressive discounts can raise sales while compressing restaurant-level margins.

A More Selective Use of Culture

McDonald’s is not leaving sports or entertainment. It continues to operate properties such as the McDonald’s All-American Games and has secured naming rights for the Chicago Fire’s future stadium.

These programs provide a different relationship with customers than a periodic global sponsorship. The Chicago stadium, for example, can support recurring events, regional offers and participation by nearby restaurants. An owned property can remain active throughout the year and provide more opportunities to connect engagement with loyalty and transactions.

External partnerships will still have a role when they deliver audiences McDonald’s cannot reach as efficiently on its own. The company’s reset suggests those investments will face a higher standard: cultural attention should lead customers into measurable relationships that McDonald’s and its franchisees can continue.

For other MULO brands, the takeaway is not to abandon sponsorships. It is to evaluate what happens after the impression … whether attention produces known customers, restaurant visits, repeat purchases and lasting value at the location level.

New Placer.ai research on Kroger, Sam’s Club and CVS highlights how shopping patterns vary across markets and formats. Those differences can help retailers and advertisers make better decisions about placement, timing and creative.

A national retail media network can offer advertisers thousands of locations through a single buying relationship. But shoppers arrive at those locations with different needs, schedules and expectations. A campaign built around the average customer can overlook the conditions that make an individual store valuable.

A recent Placer.ai report examines those differences through Kroger, Sam’s Club and CVS. Its findings provide a starting point for planning in-store advertising around how people shop, rather than treating every screen as an interchangeable placement.

One Network, Different Audiences

Kroger’s banners illustrate the importance of looking beneath a network’s national footprint. In California’s Riverside market, Ralphs’ trade area had a median household income of $113,600, compared with $78,600 for Food 4 Less. Food 4 Less also drew from trade areas with more large households.

Those differences give advertisers reasons to adjust product selection, offers and messaging within one retail media relationship. A promotion for larger package sizes, for example, might warrant different emphasis across the two banners, even within the same metropolitan area.

Trade-area demographics remain planning indicators, rather than verified characteristics of everyone exposed to an ad. Advertisers still need to connect audience assumptions with delivery and purchasing behavior.

Ace Hardware’s approach connects weather, nearby inventory and store proximity with campaign activation. Placer.ai adds another planning layer: the shopping patterns that distinguish one banner or market from another.

Shopping Time Shapes the Message

Placer.ai found that average Kroger visits lasted 24.2 minutes, ranging from 27.2 minutes in Augusta-Richmond County to 22.8 minutes in Houston. CVS presented a different pattern: 68.2% of visits lasted less than 15 minutes, and traffic skewed toward weekdays.

A short, purpose-driven trip creates a different communication opportunity from a longer grocery visit. Creative that depends on several sequential messages may struggle when shoppers are moving toward a specific destination. A concise product benefit or relevant offer may fit more naturally.

Matching campaigns to those patterns also requires timely audience activation and reporting. A weekday-focused promotion loses value if changes arrive after the relevant shopping window.

Placement matters, too. Pharmacy waiting areas, checkout screens and grocery endcaps reach customers at different moments. Total store dwell time cannot establish how long someone stood near a display or whether they noticed it.

Traffic Growth Creates Media Opportunities

Sam’s Club recorded year-over-year increases in visits and unique visitors in every month from October 2025 through September 2026. Repeat fuel visitors increased 17.4% in September.

Growing unique visitation can expand potential reach, while recurring trips create opportunities for repeated exposure. They also introduce a frequency-management challenge: regular customers may encounter the same campaign repeatedly.

Creative rotation can help keep those placements relevant. More visits can increase potential exposure, but advertiser value depends on who sees the message and what happens afterward.

Connect Local Planning With Sales Evidence

Placer.ai’s report offers behavioral context, not proof that advertising caused additional purchases. Longer visits could reflect browsing, queues or store layout. Higher traffic could result from pricing, promotions or seasonal demand.

Measurement is becoming more geographically specific. PadSquad and Cuebiq’s work on individual-store visitation and geographic performance illustrates how advertisers can examine responses below regional averages. Establishing incremental impact still requires an appropriate comparison.

Retailers can use local findings to design better tests across comparable stores, evaluating different placements, messages or schedules while accounting for inventory, pricing and promotions. Standardized buying should support those local decisions, with investment guided by evidence of additional sales rather than network size alone.

Walmart is opening its ecommerce infrastructure to outside AI shopping agents, but on terms designed to protect customer permissions, transaction data and control of checkout. The strategy offers multi-location brands an early model for treating agentic commerce as a governed channel rather than uncontrolled bot traffic.

Opening the Storefront Without Surrendering Control

Walmart is preparing for a shopping experience in which customers no longer need to visit Walmart.com, open its app or search digital aisles themselves. An AI agent could find products, compare options and complete a transaction on their behalf.

To enable that shift, the retailer has introduced Agent Profiles and Walmart Agent Gateway. Together, the tools will let customers shop at Walmart and Sam’s Club through approved third-party agents while giving the retailer a structured way to manage access. The capabilities are expected to begin appearing in customer accounts in November.

Agent Profiles will let customers authorize individual agents, monitor purchases and establish spending limits. Shoppers can require approval before a purchase, review an agent’s activity separately and revoke access. Agents will not receive customers’ payment-card information.

Agent Gateway provides the technical connection between outside assistants and Walmart’s commerce systems. Instead of navigating pages designed for people, an approved agent can use structured access to search products and complete permitted tasks. Walmart is effectively establishing an identity, permissions and transaction record for each participating agent.

Walmart and Amazon Choose Different Paths

The strategy contrasts with Amazon, which has blocked Meta’s Muse shopping agent, restricted access from other third-party assistants and sued Perplexity over allegedly unauthorized automated shopping activity.

Amazon has cited concerns involving customer credentials, data security and third-party interference with its shopping experience. Restricting outside agents also helps it protect its advertising business, recommendations and customer data.

Walmart is not offering unrestricted access. Agents must follow its pricing, returns and commerce policies, and noncompliant agents can be blocked. Only the customer information required to fulfill a specific request is supposed to be shared.

Walmart is therefore creating a permissioned channel rather than simply opening its website to bots. The approach could broaden distribution as consumers adopt assistants from Meta, OpenAI and Google, while Amazon is betting that shoppers will remain inside its own AI ecosystem.

Local Inventory Becomes Part of AI Discovery

For multi-location retailers, agentic commerce will depend heavily on accurate location-level information.

An agent buying groceries, household supplies or electronics needs more than a national product catalog. It must know whether an item is available nearby, which store can fulfill the order and whether pickup, delivery or shipping is available.

That puts additional pressure on inventory accuracy. An agent that recommends an unavailable product or routes an order to the wrong location creates a cancellation, substitution or service failure associated with the retailer’s brand.

Local prices, promotions and fulfillment capacity must also remain current. Multi-location companies already synchronize this information across websites, apps, listings and delivery platforms. AI agents add another channel that must receive reliable, machine-readable data.

Customer Ownership and Attribution Get Harder

The model raises questions about who controls the customer relationship. Walmart may process the transaction, but a third-party agent could control discovery, comparison and the final recommendation.

That changes the role of traditional ecommerce merchandising. Product-page placement, search rankings and sponsored listings become less influential when an agent creates the shortlist before the customer enters a retailer’s environment.

Retail-media attribution will also need to evolve. Brands will want to know why an agent selected one product over another, whether paid placements influenced the recommendation and which interaction ultimately produced the sale. Retailers must determine how sponsored products can participate without undermining trust in an assistant expected to represent the customer.

Walmart’s advantage is its combination of first-party data, thousands of stores and extensive fulfillment infrastructure. Agent Gateway could make those assets accessible through more consumer interfaces while keeping purchases inside Walmart’s systems.

A Governance Model for Multi-Location Brands

Most multi-location brands cannot build infrastructure on Walmart’s scale, but they still need policies before automated traffic reaches product catalogs, booking systems, loyalty accounts and checkout pages.

Those policies should define which agents are permitted, what information they can access, how consent is recorded and when purchases require approval. Brands will also need standards for agent identification, fraud prevention, returns and attribution.

Walmart’s approach recognizes that an AI agent is not simply another marketing channel. It is a new participant in the customer journey, one capable of searching, deciding and transacting. The brands that benefit will make their products and local availability accessible to trusted agents while retaining control of permissions and transaction rules