McDonald's has started showing advertising for other companies on the digital order screens of its own restaurants. Morgan Flatley, the chain's global chief marketing officer and head of new business ventures, told investors in Chicago on September 23, 2026 that a pilot of the McDonald's Media Network began in August across 450 company-operated US locations, and that the company wants to build the network into a billion-dollar business across its system over time.

In Short

McDonald's is testing ads for other brands on the digital menu screens at 450 of the US restaurants it runs itself, and it hopes the program can one day bring in about a billion dollars. That puts a fast-food chain alongside Amazon, Walmart and Uber, which already sell advertising against their own customers and screens, and it gives brands a new place to reach people waiting for their food. For now the test is small, and McDonald's has not said how the space is bought, what it costs or how anyone will prove the ads worked.

What was said on stage

Flatley's remarks came midway through an investor day built around McDonald's > NEXT, the strategy the company set out in a press release the same morning. The media network took up a single paragraph of her presentation. According to the transcript, she said:

"McDonald's Media Network is the first example. Commerce media is one of the fastest-growing areas in advertising and is expected to reach more than $100 billion in the U.S. alone by 2028. Last month, we moved into markets testing with a pilot across 450 U.S. company-owned restaurants."

She followed with the ambition. "We are at the beginning of our aspiration to build McDonald's Media Network into a billion-dollar business across the McDonald's system over time," Flatley said. "It is an opportunity to generate revenue for the system with little in the way of additional cost, no operational complexity, and no disruption to our customer experience."

That was close to the full extent of the disclosure. No advertisers were named, and there was no rate card, no technology partner, no measurement provider and no date for extending the test. The press release, dated September 23, 2026 and filed as an exhibit to a Form 8-K, does not mention the network at all. None of the seven financial targets it sets out for 2030 refers to advertising income. None of the analyst questions recorded in the transcript's question-and-answer session raised the subject either.

CNBC reported on September 23 that the pilot restaurants had begun displaying advertising for other companies on their digital order boards in the drive-thru. Gizmodo, writing on September 25, reported that the pilot is limited to menu boards, with advertising appearing after customers have placed their orders, and that the presentation included an example of a Geico advertisement occupying half of a drive-thru menu screen. Neither report states that Geico is buying inventory in the test.

How much of the estate the test covers

A 450-restaurant pilot is a thin slice of a large footprint. CNBC put McDonald's US estate at roughly 14,000 locations, so the test reaches about 3.2% of them.

Ownership matters more than the count. According to McDonald's, approximately 95% of its restaurants worldwide are owned and operated by independent local business owners. The pilot runs only where the company is the operator, and CNBC reported that it has not yet been extended to the franchisees who run the rest of the US network. The direction of travel widens that gap. Global chief financial officer Ian Borden told investors the company is targeting an increase in its franchised mix from about 95% to about 98% globally by the end of 2028. The pool of screens McDonald's controls directly is scheduled to shrink, not grow.

Any path to a billion dollars therefore runs through franchisees. Flatley described the network as a way to create "new high-margin sources of value for McDonald's and our franchisees", which implies shared proceeds. How revenue would be split, whether operators could opt out, and whether the billion-dollar figure refers to gross advertising sales across the system or to revenue McDonald's itself would book were not addressed. CNBC described the hope that the network "could eventually grow to be a $1 billion business for the company." The transcript says "across the McDonald's system over time", with no year attached.

The financial backdrop explains some of the interest. McDonald's plans to provide approximately $8.5 billion in partnering support to franchisees through 2036, about $5 billion of it through 2030, through a combination of rent relief and capital support, according to the release. CNBC framed the network as a potential source of high-margin revenue at a time when costs for inputs such as beef are climbing and the chain is committing billions to restaurant upgrades.

What the screens carry - and what remains unsaid

Accounts of the inventory diverge. Gizmodo characterised the plan as putting advertising "across the company's app and nearly every digital screen in its restaurants", including menu boards, drive-thru screens and self-order kiosks. The transcript supports a narrower reading. Flatley listed "an unmatched footprint from our app to kiosks, menu boards, and restaurants" among the assets McDonald's is looking at, alongside "more than 70 million daily customers globally", without saying which surfaces would carry outside advertising. The only placement confirmed in the pilot is the order board, and only once the order is complete.

That sequencing is consistent with the claim of "no disruption". A screen that shows an insurance offer after the customer has finished ordering does not compete with the menu during the transaction. The audience at that moment is someone waiting, usually in a car, to pay or to collect food.

Much of what buyers would need to know is absent. McDonald's did not say whether the space will be sold directly, through programmatic marketplaces or through a technology partner. It did not describe how exposure is counted, whether per screen play or per vehicle, or how frequency would be managed for a customer who passes through several times a week. Nor did it say whether creative can vary by daypart, weather or location.

The data question

Gizmodo's subheading states that McDonald's plans to use customer data to sell targeted ads. The body of the same article is more tentative: "Now, it appears McDonald's will use that data not just to sell burgers and fries, but whatever its advertisers are hawking." The transcript contains no explicit statement linking loyalty data to ad targeting or measurement for the network. It does contain a detailed account of what the company holds.

According to Flatley, the loyalty program counts nearly 220 million 90-day active members, up 45% over three years. "If they were a country, it would be the seventh largest in the world," she said. Active members visit 2.5 times as often as non-members. The press release uses the same "nearly 220 million" figure, across 70 loyalty markets. The number drifts elsewhere. Later in her presentation Flatley referred to "our 220 million active loyalty customers", Borden spoke during questions of a loyalty base of "220+ million", and Gizmodo wrote that the program "has more than 220 million members." The company's written disclosure carries the lower, hedged figure.

Other details fill in the picture. Flatley said that at any moment roughly 150 million people who signed up for loyalty but have not visited in a few months are available to reengage. Chairman and chief executive Chris Kempczinski said loyalty accounts for about 30% of sales, answering an analyst's question about the US business, and he described the member base as providing "more data and better insights than anyone else, an asset particularly valuable for training new AI capabilities." Brian Rice, the global chief information officer, said the company's standard restaurant data lake "captures billions of data points daily" across more than 46,000 restaurants. The app is being rebuilt as GMA One, a single global platform that Dario Baroni, president of the International Developmental Licensed Markets segment, said will reach the top 10 largest owned markets by the end of 2028.

Progress against earlier targets is uneven. In a 2023 investor update filed with the SEC, McDonald's set out plans to reach 250 million 90-day active loyalty users and $45 billion in annual systemwide sales to loyalty members by 2027. Neither the transcript nor the 2026 press release restates those targets.

Partnerships are pulling the loyalty program outward. Flatley said the company is evolving it "from a points program to a partnership platform", with Uber ride credits and Disney+ subscriptions coming for US members before the end of the year. In Germany, up to 20% of customers who took part in partner offers were new or infrequent loyalty members, she said. Uber is itself a sizeable advertising seller, from in-car tablet content through JourneyTV Presents to a LiveRamp clean room where brands upload sales data to see how Uber campaigns influenced purchases.

Data governance has drawn regulators before: Poland's data protection authority fined McDonald's Polska about EUR 3.89 million in July 2025 over employee records exposed through a processor. That case concerned staff, not customers.

Measuring ads for things McDonald's does not sell

The Geico example goes straight to the measurement problem. Retail media grew on a closed loop: an advertiser buys exposure on a retailer's property and the retailer reports whether that exposure produced a sale in its own records. Retail media networks sell that loop above everything else. An insurer advertising at a burger counter is non-endemic by definition, since McDonald's does not sell policies, and no purchase record exists on the McDonald's side to close the loop. There is an irony in the category mapping, too: Walmart Connect lists quick-service restaurants, alongside insurance, automotive, financial services and travel, among the non-endemic categories it courts with offsite inventory.

At IAB Australia's retail media summit in July 2026, panellists noted that return on ad spend and incremental sales cannot be calculated for products a retailer does not sell, a problem CommBank Connect faces as a largely non-endemic network. A restaurant menu carries few outside brands compared with a supermarket shelf, which means a large share of the potential demand for McDonald's screens is likely to sit in categories of that kind.

Industry standards do not map neatly onto a drive-thru. The IAB and IAB Europe opened the first industry-wide measurement standards for advertising inside physical shops to public comment in September 2024, and the finalised framework divides in-store inventory into five zones: exterior, entrance, checkout, aisles and other. An order point in the drive-thru lane sits outside the building yet functions as the till. The distinction between channels depends on data rather than hardware: a screen counts as digital out-of-home when it is bought on venue type alone, and as in-store retail media when it is measured against the operator's own shopper data. Which of the two McDonald's is selling depends on details it has not published.

Causal proof is the harder standard. The IAB and IAB Europe issued guidelines for incremental measurement in commerce media in November 2025, defining incrementality as the additional outcomes a campaign produced compared with what would have happened without it. Screen networks have found that bar difficult. Metcash, which runs more than 800 screens across its Australian banners, argued in July 2026 that judging retail media mainly on incremental sales limits its access to brand budgets.

Where the $100 billion comes from

Flatley did not cite a source for the forecast. A figure of the same size has circulated for a year. When Mastercard opened its own network in October 2025, it entered a market projected to reach $100 billion by 2028; in that coverage, the eMarketer projection behind the number referred to retail media spending. The distinction is not pedantic. Commerce media is the wider category, covering payments, travel and delivery businesses with no shop, and retail media is a subset of it. Which forecast McDonald's used, and whether it expects to compete for trade and shopper budgets or for brand budgets, would shape how its network is priced.

How the ambition compares

Set against the leaders, a billion dollars is modest. Amazon's advertising revenue reached $68.6 billion in 2025, which CNBC put at just under 10% of the company's overall revenue, and the business grew 26% to $19.8 billion in the second quarter of 2026. McDonald's target amounts to roughly 1.5% of Amazon's 2025 total.

Walmart is the closer analogue because of its physical estate. CNBC wrote that Walmart does not share specific sales results for its advertising unit, though Walmart did put its global advertising business at nearly $6.4 billion for fiscal 2026, roughly six times what McDonald's is aiming for. Walmart Connect grew 43% in the fiscal second quarter that Walmart reported on August 20, 2026. The retailer operated 170,000 digital screens across more than 4,500 stores as of January 2026. McDonald's did not disclose how many screens its restaurants hold.

Restaurant chains already appear on the other side of these networks. DoorDash reported more than 400,000 advertisers across DoorDash, Wolt and Deliveroo in June 2026, including restaurants, and said a test with a national restaurant chain found 81% of the customers engaging with that brand on DoorDash did not appear in the chain's own customer data. A Forrester study commissioned by Koddi, covering seven sectors including quick-service restaurants, found in November 2025 that only 13% of commerce media organisations qualified as trailblazers.

CNBC described McDonald's as a potential pioneer in the restaurant industry for building its own network. Restaurant screens are not new inventory, however. Third-party operators have sold them for some time: DIRECTV opened its commercial-venue television network, including restaurants and bars, to programmatic digital out-of-home buyers in January 2026. What is different is a chain of this size selling its own order screens under its own brand.

A big buyer that intends to buy less

The network arrives as McDonald's reshapes its own spending. Flatley said the brand captures approximately 40% of positive brand mentions on social media across the leading quick-service brands, more than its next three competitors combined. "This is not an audience we have to buy our way into. We've already got them. They're ours," she said. Campaigns are being designed to be carried by fans and creators, she added, because "less paid media is required to reach the same audiences." The company is roughly doubling investment in longer-running programs on brand, taste, quality and value while cutting the number of short-term promotional campaigns. Its Menu Heist campaign ran with around 10 major partners rather than the 40 that would traditionally have been used if each market executed locally, according to Manu Steijaert, president of International Operated Markets.

McDonald's has been a buyer of the same kind of inventory it now plans to sell. Snap named it an initial partner when it opened Promoted Places on Snap Map in October 2024. For agencies and media owners, the chain is now two things at once: an advertiser consolidating partners and leaning on earned reach, and a new seller entering the market for commerce budgets.

Borden framed the reach argument in an interview with CNBC. "We serve about 85% of the U.S. population at least once a year, so we have reach that's quite unique, and we have 14,000 locations across the U.S., which means we're in every community, and we're connecting with every consumer," he said. The pilot currently reaches a fraction of those locations, and none of the franchised ones.

Timeline

Summary

Who: McDonald's Corporation, through global chief marketing officer and head of new business ventures Morgan Flatley, with context from chief executive Chris Kempczinski and chief financial officer Ian Borden. The network affects advertisers seeking commerce media inventory, agencies planning retail and out-of-home budgets, and the franchisees who operate about 95% of McDonald's restaurants.

What: The McDonald's Media Network, which displays advertising for other companies on digital order boards. A pilot runs in 450 company-operated US restaurants, with ads reportedly shown after orders are placed. The company aims to build the network into a billion-dollar business across its system over time, but disclosed no pricing, buying method, measurement approach or rollout date.

When: The pilot began in August 2026. The network was disclosed at McDonald's investor day on September 23, 2026.

Where: Company-operated McDonald's restaurants in the United States, out of a US estate of roughly 14,000 locations and more than 46,000 worldwide. The investor day took place at the company's Chicago headquarters.

Why: McDonald's describes commerce media as a fast-growing category worth more than $100 billion in the US by 2028, and the network as a source of high-margin revenue with little added cost. It arrives as the company commits about $8.5 billion in franchisee support through 2036 and targets a franchised mix of 98% by the end of 2028 - a shift that makes franchisee participation the deciding factor in whether the network reaches scale.