Inside the Room Where QSR Is Reinventing Itself
The QSR industry is at a crossroads. Inflation-fatigued consumers are making every dining decision with more scrutiny than ever. Franchisee relationships are under pressure. Digital transformation is separating the leaders from the laggards. And a new generation of marketing tools — from synthetic data to creator-led content — is reshaping how brands compete for attention and loyalty.
This year's MediaPost QSR Brand Insider Summit in Savannah brought together some of the sharpest marketing minds in the industry from Chick-fil-A, Noodles & Company, Zaxby's, Potbelly, Church's Chicken, Blaze Pizza, Dunkin', Aroma Joe's, FiiZ Drinks, Tropical Smoothie Cafe, and more for four days of candid conversation about what's working, what's broken, and where the category is heading.
Campfire was honored to be an invited VIP Guest representing media strategy and buying in the room with experience across QSR and fast-casual restaurant brands. Here's what the room was telling us, and what it means for where QSR brand-building goes from here.
The Discount Addiction Is Breaking the Industry and Brands Are Finally Getting Clean
Perhaps the most consistent theme across every session was the long hangover from discount dependency. Session after session, brand leaders described the same spiral: promotional offers drive traffic, traffic masks margin erosion, the cycle attracts deal-seekers rather than loyal customers, and the brand loses its pricing power and its story.
Noodles & Company offered the most detailed autopsy. After years of defensive marketing and a discount-heavy playbook, the brand made a decisive pivot: cutting $1.5M from its promotional budget and reallocating it to paid media that leaned heavier into the brand positioning. The approach was surgical — they tested discount reduction in graduated steps ($2 → $1 → $0) with message-only alternatives, tracking customer response at each stage. The insight that reframed everything: price wasn't even in the top five priorities for their guests. Convenience ranked higher.
Pokeworks went even further. In September 2023, they were running promotions 17 days a month. By 2025, that number was down to 4 days a year achieved through a deliberate "boiling frog" strategy of incremental reduction. The payoff: first-party digital sales doubled in two years.
The industry data from HarrisQuest made the cost of this shift viscerally clear. Eighty-one percent of QSR customers say prices are higher than expected. Forty-five percent of Americans are eating out less than they were a year ago. And yet brands that reinvested in service rather than discounting grew eight times faster than their discount-reliant counterparts.
“Price wasn’t even in the top five priorities for their guests. Convenience ranked higher.”
The forward implication: The discount floor is collapsing as a viable strategy. The brands that will win the next five years are those building equity in quality, experience, and emotional connection - not transaction volume propped up by margin-killing offers. Measurement frameworks need to evolve alongside this shift: tracking "brand momentum" metrics before they show up (or don't) in transaction data is becoming table stakes.
The Full Funnel Is Back and Performance Marketing Is Being Put in Its Proper Place
Multiple brand leaders confessed to the same mistake: over-rotating toward performance marketing at the expense of brand building, only to watch customer acquisition costs climb and brand health quietly erode.
One leader described a period of "chasing shiny objects" — reactive, tactically-driven marketing without a coherent funnel strategy. Our client Aroma Joe’s shared the importance and value of building top-of-funnel investment and learning to communicate media mix strategy in "franchisee language" — translating awareness metrics and brand equity concepts into profit-and-loss terms that operators actually care about.
The line that landed hardest, from the full funnel session:
“No one gets to the bottom of the funnel if you didn’t capture them at the top.”
Blaze Pizza demonstrated what full-funnel thinking looks like in practice. Their Marvel Daredevil partnership wasn't just a clever co-brand — it was a sequenced campaign that used earned media, organic social drops (500 free pizza codes via push notification, gone in 15 minutes), weekly loyalty touchpoints tied to episode releases, and doorbuster events in select locations to drive 17,000 verified new guests. The campaign was architected as a funnel, not a moment.
The forward implication: The pendulum is swinging back toward brand. But the smarter brands aren't abandoning performance they're demanding that both brand and performance spend be measured against the same north stars. The emerging standard is full-funnel attribution that proves brand investment drives bottom-funnel results, not just awareness scores.
The Creator Economy Is the New Local Marketing and It's More Scalable Than Anyone Expected
If there was a single tactical consensus at the summit, it was this: micro and nano influencers, executing with minimal creative direction, are outperforming polished brand content across virtually every channel, and funding is coming directly from the traditional production budgets.
Zaxby's built an extremely mature framework in the room. Their three-tier creator system — LTO Partners (mega/macro for product launches), Day-to-Day Partners (cultural moments and deals), and Evergreen Partners (always-on content) — produced a 10x growth in influencer partnerships from 2024 to 2025 and 12.5x growth in contracted posts. Their Giant Quesadillas campaign alone drove 25M+ views from influencer content. The Lemon Pepper LTO, activated through creator Quavo, produced 790% audience growth and 30,000 loyalty sign-ups — and is now a permanent menu item.
Church's Chicken took a different but complementary approach. By deeply defining their core consumer persona "Alex" — a detailed, named archetype developed in a two-day cross-functional workshop — they gave their influencer and social strategy a clear filter. Creators who reflect Alex's lifestyle. Content that sounds like Alex, not like a marketing department. The result: social engagement rates described as "off the charts" and sales outperforming the QSR category.
CMO Carrie Riley of Aroma Joe's, targeting a younger demographic, put it most bluntly:
“If you look at the content and think ‘what is marketing doing?’ — we nailed it.”
Over-produced content signals inauthenticity to this generation. Unpolished wins.
FiiZ Drinks is running their entire influencer program with 2.5 marketing team members. Cici's Pizza is executing 15 influencer partnerships per quarter. The scale is no longer the barrier - the strategy is.
The forward implication: Creator-led content is not a social media tactic. It is becoming the primary content engine for QSR brands — replacing traditional brand shoots, outperforming TV spots in paid social amplification, and serving as the most credible form of word-of-mouth at scale. Brands that build repeatable creator systems — not one-off activations — will compound their cultural relevance faster than those still relying on overly-produced campaigns. NIL partnerships with local college athletes represent the next underpriced opportunity in this space.
Cultural Intelligence Is the New Competitive Research
One of the opening sessions reframed something fundamental: most QSR brands are trapped in "category echo chambers," benchmarking against competitors and iterating incrementally rather than looking at what consumers are actually doing and talking about in the broader culture.
One of the marketing methodologies — analyzing UGC social video data to identify "share of attention" — it surfaced a counterintuitive finding that's worth sitting with: UGC content performs 13-14x better than owned content. And brands with higher share of attention generate 2x the ROI of competitors.
A Unilever case study illustrated what acting on this intelligence looks like. A cleaning product brand discovered an unexpected audience: sneakerheads. The activation was minimal (a Lollapalooza package, mini product samples, shoe brushes), but the insight was sharp enough that it launched an entirely new product innovation pipeline. Different vertical, but easy to see how it translates.
The forward implication: Brands that invest in cultural intelligence as an ongoing practice — not a quarterly research cycle — will be faster to identify emerging audiences, partnership opportunities, and content white space. The shift is from "what are our competitors doing" to "what is culture doing, and where do we have a right to show up?"
“The opportunity wasn’t in the category — it was at the intersection of the category and culture.”
First-Party Data and Digital Infrastructure Are Now Table Stakes But Measurement Is Still Broken
Potbelly offered one of the most technically detailed look at digital maturity in the room. Their two-year journey — one year building a data layer, one year rolling it out — followed a clear principle: data infrastructure before features. Personalization without a data foundation is guesswork. With it, Potbelly is now running one-to-one personalization across app, email, SMS, and push; using machine learning for predictive segmentation; and pivoting offers in real time based on incrementality data.
The lesson they emphasized hardest: measurement strategy must be designed before features are built, not retrofitted afterward. Most brands get this backwards.
Chick-fil-A's Brian Smith offered a candid counterpoint from a brand at the opposite end of the maturity curve: they have an abundance of first-party data but don’t currently use it for media distribution. "What do we do with it?" was his honest framing of where many QSR brands actually are — even large, sophisticated ones.
Dunkin' reported 40% of their business through mobile orders and 34% of digital sales through loyalty. The challenge they're wrestling with: third-party delivery doesn't build brand relationships, and the generational gap in digital behavior (Gen Z uses 19 apps vs. one for Boomers) requires fundamentally different engagement strategies.
HarrisQuest's data gave the measurement gap a sharper edge: most brands optimize for easy metrics (transaction frequency, average order value, digital adoption) while missing the leading indicators of brand health. Sales and NPS are lagging indicators. Brand momentum shifts are happening before orders reflect them and brands can be hitting dashboard numbers while quietly losing brand strength.
“Brands can be hitting every dashboard number while quietly losing brand strength. Sales are a lagging indicator — brand momentum shifts first.”
The forward implication: The next competitive frontier in QSR isn't exclusively hanging in the balance of having first-party data — it's knowing what to do with it. Brands that connect their data infrastructure to real-time decision-making (offer personalization, media targeting, menu innovation) will move faster than those treating their CRM as a reporting tool. And CDM’s or synthetic data platforms — which demonstrated a jump from 45% to 68% location accuracy for Coca-Cola vending placement and a 76% increase in sales — suggest that AI-generated consumer intelligence will soon close the gap for brands without deep first-party data assets.
Local Marketing Is Making a Comeback and Scale Is No Longer an Excuse to Abandon It
Chick-fil-A's Brian Smith articulated a tension that resonated across the room: the brand's historical identity as a "network of small businesses" is declining as a consumer perception and that erosion concerns him deeply, because it's core to the brand's magic.
The response is a reinvestment in local: regional marketing directors equipped with playbooks, community and media partnership guidelines, and studio assets. Not a replacement for national, but an "hourglass" model — national layer, market layer, local layer — that allows community relevance to coexist with scale.
Aroma Joe's made the same point from a franchise perspective: local operators know their communities better than corporate. High school sports sponsorships. Local media and events. The operators who are embedded in their communities get "high-fived at those events." The ones who aren't look like outsiders.
Blaze Pizza's doorbuster comic book events — where customers drove three hours and lined up at 6am — were not national activations. They were local moments, engineered deliberately and amplified nationally.
The forward implication: Hyper-local activation is becoming a differentiator rather than a default. This is a page from the Campfire playbook we aren’t adapting to, this concept of leveraging local media even for national brands are grounded into our DNA and best case studies from the past decade of work. As national media costs rise and algorithmic platforms commoditize reach, the brands that build genuine community presence — through local creators, NIL partnerships, community events, local media and operator-empowered marketing — will build the kind of trust and frequency that no national campaign can replicate at scale.
The Small Team Problem Is Real and It's Reshaping How Brands Buy Agency Services
One of the most consistent realities voiced throughout the summit wasn't in any session title: most of these brand marketing teams are operating with lean, often under-resourced staff. A 2.5-person marketing team running influencer programs. Brand strategists wearing three hats. CMOs making tactical decisions because there's no one else.
This context reframes how brand leaders are evaluating outside partners. The question isn't "what can an agency do for us?" It's "can this partner make us faster, smarter, and more effective without adding management overhead that we don't have capacity for?"
The brands that described their best agency and vendor relationships consistently used the same language: partners who understand the business, speak operator language, bring a point of view, and move quickly. What they described avoiding: partners who require heavy hand-holding, generate reports rather than recommendations, or treat every engagement as a scope expansion opportunity.
“Our currency is intimacy.”
Where This Is All Going: The Next Three Years in QSR Marketing
Looking across all of these signals, several convergent trends point toward a clear near-term future:
Brand equity becomes the primary competitive moat. As discounting loses its effectiveness and pricing power erodes under consumer pressure, the brands with the strongest emotional resonance — the ones consumers feel something about — will command the loyalty and frequency that sustains the business. Brand building isn't soft; it's the hardest, highest-leverage work in the category.
Creator systems replace campaign thinking. The shift from "influencer campaign" to "creator ecosystem" is accelerating. Brands will build standing networks of creators at every tier — evergreen, occasion-based, LTO — and those systems will generate content, drive trial, support loyalty, and fuel paid media simultaneously. The brands doing this well today have a compounding advantage that will be very hard to close in three years.
AI accelerates both the intelligence and the execution layer. Cultural intelligence platforms, synthetic data, predictive segmentation, real-time offer personalization — these are moving from pilot projects to core infrastructure. The brands that build the data and AI layer now will make faster, better decisions at lower cost. The ones that don't will be playing catch-up with structurally higher operating costs.
Local becomes the differentiator. As national media becomes more expensive and less differentiated, the brands that crack local activation — through empowered operators, community creators, NIL, and geographic media precision — will win the occasions and frequency that national campaigns can't reach.
Measurement catches up to brand. The HarrisQuest framing — that brands can hit dashboard numbers while quietly losing brand strength — is pushing the industry toward more sophisticated leading indicators. Always-on brand tracking, sentiment measurement, share of attention metrics, and full-funnel attribution will become standard practice rather than premium add-ons.
Where Campfire Fits: A Growth Partner Built for This Moment
The conversations at this summit described a specific kind of need — one that Campfire is built around and already meets.
QSR brand leaders are navigating more complexity with fewer internal resources than at any point in recent memory. They're making high-stakes media investment decisions without the data infrastructure, audience intelligence, or channel expertise to know if that investment is working. And they need partners who can both think and execute — without adding coordination overhead to already lean teams.
Campfire is not a cost center. We're a growth driver.
We are a strategy-first paid media agency. That distinction matters. Everything we do — every channel recommendation, every budget allocation, every creative flight — is anchored to a clear understanding of your business challenge and your audience.
Here's what that looks like in practice for QSR brands:
We start with deep audience research. Before we recommend a single channel or place a single dollar, we conduct rigorous audience research using tools like GWI to build behavioral personas — mapping media consumption habits, lifestyle signals, competitive preferences, and the real triggers behind purchase decisions. AdTech we are invested in like Browsi help take this work even deeper as we align personas like “Alex” to actual media investment strategies. This is the foundation that almost every brand leader at this summit said they were missing or underinvesting in. Church's didn't build "Alex" in a vacuum; that persona came from immersive research. Zaxby's didn't stumble into their three-tier creator system — they understood exactly who their audience was and where they lived. That kind of audience clarity is what makes every downstream media decision more efficient and every dollar more accountable.
We take your brand framework and make it perform. Campfire doesn't do brand thinking — that's your work, or your brand agency's. What we do is take a strong brand foundation and translate it into an advertising strategy that's accountable to real business outcomes. Whether the goal is top-of-funnel reach, loyalty app adoption, AUV growth, or amplifying creator content in paid media — we set media KPIs that are directly aligned to the brand, its audience, and the business objective. The brands at this summit that struggled weren't struggling because they had bad creative. They were struggling because their media investment wasn't connected to a clear strategy. Brands described years of chasing "shiny objects" without a coherent funnel. Noodles described traffic driven by discounts that looked like success but was hollowing out the brand. The fix in these cases wasn't a new brand it was a disciplined media strategy tied to the right outcomes.
We are platform-agnostic. We don't have preferred partners or channel biases. We go where your audience is and where the evidence points — whether that's CTV, paid social, programmatic OOH, Google PMAX campaigns, streaming audio, search, or emerging platforms. The Arima case study from the summit is instructive here: national media mix models missed that out-of-home was critical in Chicago and NYC lunch crowds but irrelevant in suburbs — and that Meta outperformed TikTok in markets where the national data said the opposite. Platform-agnostic thinking catches those nuances. Platform-loyal thinking that often comes from media operators working in a Google silo misses them.
We hold media accountable to outcomes. The HarrisQuest data was pointed: most brands optimize for easy metrics while missing the leading indicators of brand health. Campfire's measurement approach is designed before campaigns launch — not retrofitted after. We establish measurable KPIs per channel, map media investment to business outcomes, and run structured test-and-learn frameworks so that every dollar spent is generating learnable signal. When Potbelly said measurement planning must be a design-phase priority, not an afterthought — that's how we operate by default.
We integrate across your full marketing ecosystem. Paid media doesn't exist in a silo. We plan in direct coordination with PR, events, organic, and sales to avoid cannibalization and maximize incrementality. For QSR brands with franchise structures, that means translating media strategy into the language operators actually care about: traffic, profitable order count, contribution margin and not just impressions and ROAS.
We work at the speed of a small team, not a large agency, because with intention… we are one. For brand leaders managing with lean staff, adding an agency relationship should remove complexity, not create it. Our model is built around embedded partnership — a senior team that brings a clear point of view, moves quickly, and doesn't require heavy hand-holding to stay aligned with your business.
The QSR brands that will win the next three years aren't the ones with the biggest media budgets or most headcount on the team. They're the ones with the clearest audience understanding, the most disciplined channel strategy, and the tightest connection between media investment and measurable growth. That's exactly the work Campfire exists to do.
Campfire is a strategy-first paid media agency specializing in QSR, food & beverage, and consumer brands. We work with growth-stage and established brands who need senior strategic thinking and platform-agnostic execution — without the overhead of a traditional agency model. If the themes in this article resonate with challenges you're navigating, we'd welcome the conversation.
Sources: MediaPost QSR Brand Insider Summit, Savannah, GA, May 3–6, 2026. Session notes from presentations by Winnin, Noodles & Company, HarrisQuest, Church's Chicken, Chick-fil-A, Zeta, Aroma Joe's, Blaze Pizza, Potbelly, Zaxby's, FiiZ Drinks, and Cicis Pizza.
