McDonald's is building a media network that would sell advertising space on its digital drive-thru order boards, joining Walmart and Amazon in a race to turn retail foot traffic into ad revenue, with hopes the venture could eventually reach $1 billion.
The fast-food giant unveiled the plan at an investor day event at its Chicago headquarters, where executives pitched the new business as a high-margin revenue stream that requires almost no extra work from restaurant crews. A pilot program already running at 450 company-owned U.S. restaurants displays ads for other companies on the digital screens customers see when they pull up to order.
Morgan Flatley, McDonald's global chief marketing officer and executive vice president of new business ventures, framed the move as a natural step into a booming sector. CNBC reported that Flatley told investors the opportunity carries minimal downside for the company's core operations.
"It's an opportunity to yield revenue for the system with little in the way of additional cost, no operational complexity and no disruption to our customer experience."
That pitch matters because McDonald's is staring down rising input costs, beef prices chief among them, while simultaneously planning to pour billions of dollars into restaurant upgrades over the coming decade. A new revenue line that doesn't require more labor, more equipment, or more complexity is exactly the kind of margin play Wall Street rewards.
McDonald's is not inventing this playbook. It is copying one that two of the largest companies on earth have already pressure-tested.
Amazon reported $68.6 billion in advertising service sales in 2025, just under 10 percent of the company's total revenue. Those ads appear across Amazon's shopping pages, Prime Video, package lockers, the live-streaming platform Twitch, and third-party apps and websites. What started as a side business now produces tens of billions.
Walmart followed a similar path with its U.S. ad arm, Walmart Connect. Sales in that unit grew 43 percent in the company's most recent fiscal second quarter. Walmart runs ads on its app, its website, inside more than 4,600 U.S. stores, and on outside platforms like Instagram. In late 2024, Walmart acquired TV maker Vizio, a move widely read as a bet on turning living-room screens into another ad surface. Walmart does not break out specific dollar figures for the advertising unit.
The common thread is simple: companies with enormous, captive audiences realized they were sitting on advertising gold. McDonald's executives believe they hold the same card.
CFO Ian Borden made the scale argument in blunt terms, telling CNBC that few companies in any industry can match McDonald's physical reach.
"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."
Borden also pointed to brand value as a competitive advantage.
"We have one of the most valuable brands of any company of our size and scale in any industry."
Those numbers give McDonald's a pitch to potential advertisers that few restaurant chains could replicate. Roughly 14,000 domestic locations mean presence in virtually every media market in the country, urban, suburban, and rural. For an advertiser trying to reach working families on a Tuesday afternoon, a drive-thru screen in Topeka or Tampa is a direct line.
The broader commerce media sector, where retailers and consumer-facing companies sell ad space on their own platforms, is growing fast enough to attract new entrants well beyond traditional retail. Flatley cited a projection that the U.S. commerce media market alone will exceed $100 billion by 2028.
"Commerce media is one of the fastest-growing areas in advertising, and it's expected to reach more than $100 billion in the U.S. alone by 2028."
If that forecast holds, McDonald's $1 billion aspiration would represent roughly 1 percent of the total market, ambitious for a restaurant company, but modest relative to what Amazon already pulls in.
One detail worth watching: the 450-restaurant pilot launched in August runs exclusively at company-owned locations. McDonald's has not yet rolled the media network out to franchisees, who operate the vast majority of the chain's U.S. restaurants. How that expansion works, including revenue-sharing arrangements and operational requirements, remains unanswered. Franchisee buy-in will likely determine whether the network ever reaches the scale Borden described.
McDonald's also has not disclosed which companies are currently advertising on the pilot screens, what criteria it uses to select advertisers, or whether the media network will eventually extend beyond drive-thru boards to other in-restaurant or digital surfaces.
Strip away the corporate jargon and the investor-day polish, and McDonald's is doing something straightforward: monetizing attention it already owns. Every car idling at a drive-thru screen is a pair of eyes with nothing else to look at. Selling that moment to a third-party advertiser costs McDonald's almost nothing and adds pure margin.
It is the same logic that turned Amazon from a bookstore into an ad juggernaut and Walmart from a discount retailer into a media company. Whether a fast-food chain can replicate that success depends on execution, franchisee cooperation, and whether advertisers see a drive-thru screen the same way they see a search result or a store endcap.
When companies compete for ad dollars by offering better reach at lower cost, consumers and advertisers both benefit. That is the market working the way it should, no subsidy required, no regulator needed, just a business finding value where it already had the audience.