Last week, more than 100 restaurant marketers gathered in the Chicago offices of Meta to hear the social media giant’s pitch on how it can help their brands reach more customers.
Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp, is one of the biggest advertising platforms in the world. It generated $134 billion in revenue last year, almost all of which came from ads sold on Facebook and Instagram. More than 3 billion people use one of Meta’s apps every day. To put that into perspective, about 124 million people watched the Super Bowl last year.
That enormous audience has made Meta an essential advertising channel for businesses, including restaurant chains. Indeed, it would be difficult to find a large chain that isn’t devoting at least some of its marketing budget to one or more of Meta’s apps.
And while TV ads remain the biggest driver of incremental sales for restaurants, Meta is right behind them, said Todd Glavinskas, director of Meta’s global business group, which includes the restaurant category.
The second Meta Restaurant Summit (the company hosted a similar event in 2019) came at an opportune time, as restaurants are shifting more of their marketing dollars to digital channels. It’s part of the industry’s digital transformation since the pandemic, when restaurants evolved from being a mostly in-person business to one that is increasingly omnichannel. With more orders flowing in online, restaurants started doing more marketing there as well.
“The shift from that huge amount of money that was spent on [brand advertising on TV] started to shift to digital,” Glavinskas said.
In May, for instance, McDonald’s announced that it planned to invest hundreds of millions of dollars into digital marketing in the coming years. Some of that money will be reallocated from channels that have shown a lower return on investment.
Social media in general has become a powerful marketing tool for restaurants. It was a viral tweet, after all, that fueled the rise of Popeyes’ wildly popular chicken sandwich in 2019. More recently, Chili’s saw sales surge after its mozzarella sticks went viral (twice) on TikTok. That has added another layer to how brands approach online marketing.
Meta’s Restaurant Summit offered a glimpse at how one of the largest digital ad providers is working to entice restaurants to buy more ads at a time when many operations are looking to do just that. Here’s what was shared at the daylong event on Oct. 1.
KFC saturated Facebook with ads for its chicken nuggets. | All images courtesy of Meta
A big audience
Meta’s massive audience makes the platform a place where restaurant chains can reach a lot of people, and fast.
And the company offers ad products for all parts of the marketing funnel, from creating awareness at the top to driving purchases at the bottom, Glavinskas said.
Ads promoting limited-time offers are popular, as are those that encourage consumers to download a brand’s mobile app.
For KFC, Meta’s scale was a key factor when it was creating a marketing strategy for its new chicken nuggets last year. It would be the chain’s biggest campaign of the year and one that called for a strong push.
KFC opted to use a new Meta ad product called the Meta Moment Maker, a concentrated three-day blast of video ads designed to get a lot of eyeballs in a short period. The brand followed that up with a more sustained video and photo ad campaign.
The two-pronged campaign reached nearly 110 million people, according to data shared at the event. And surveys after the fact showed that the ads drove a 6-point lift in purchase intent and a 1.5-point increase in customers who said they bought the nuggets, which was better than other campaigns the brand had run.
Connecting with Gen Z
Not only is Meta a place where brands can reach a lot of people, it’s also a place to reach a lot of young people, particularly Gen Zers. Most restaurants covet the attention of this group of 12- to 27-year-olds, who tend to be affluent, influential and brand-focused.
According to data from researcher GWI presented at the event, Gen Z not only spends more time on social media than any other generation—just under three hours a day—but also has significant spending power: The average Gen Zer earns more than $90,000 a year.
Gen Z also treats social media as a place of commerce as well as communication. Sixty-seven percent said they have searched for information about brands or products on Instagram, and 20% said they had clicked on a sponsored ad on Instagram, per GWI data.
Notably, Gen Z is looking for brands to “make the first move” on social media, said Danielle Portnoy, senior manager of strategic insights at GWI. In other words, they expect companies to find them through targeted ads, rather than having to seek out relevant brands themselves.
Advertisers can use AI to generate content.
A big bet on AI
Artificial intelligence has long been a differentiator for Meta. The technology has powered Facebook feeds since the site was founded 20 years ago, Glavinskas said, and it remains central to everything the company does.
Recently, Meta has worked to bolster this advantage. For instance, it has its own data centers around the world that fuel its AI. It also has its own AI programming language, PyTorch. In the second quarter alone, the company spent $8.5 billion on AI infrastructure like servers and data centers, an increase of 33% from a year ago.
For Facebook and Instagram users, Meta’s AI determines what content they see as they scroll their feeds. On the ads side, AI is used to help target advertising to the right people and even generate content for ads. This has served to both lower the cost of ads and make them more effective.
In 2023, Meta ad impressions increased by 28% year over year, and the average price per ad decreased by 9%, according to a financial filing.
In general terms, for every $1 an advertiser spends on Meta, it gets $3.71 in return, Glavinskas said. But when using Meta’s AI-powered ad products, the return increases to $4.80. “In the big scheme of things, that’s a massive ROI that’s unparalleled versus the competition,” he said.
Here’s how that might work in practice. Using one of Meta’s AI-powered campaigns, a brand can upload up to 150 creative assets and choose a country to target. The AI takes it from there, making decisions about how to distribute the ads across audiences.
The AI-driven approach yielded good results for fast casual WaBa Grill, which lowered its cost per purchase by 14% and multiplied its return on ad spend by 14, according to data shared at the event.
Wendy's used WhatsApp to chat directly with Spanish-speaking customers.
Sending a message
Though Facebook and Instagram make up the bulk of advertising activity within Meta, it has also been developing ad features for its messaging apps, Messenger and WhatsApp, where brands get the rare opportunity to have direct conversations with customers.
In February, Wendy’s became the first quick-service chain in the U.S. to run a campaign that sent users to WhatsApp when they clicked on an ad on Facebook or Instagram. From there, an automated Wendy’s chatbot would offer them two digital offers that could be redeemed in Wendy’s mobile app.
The campaign was specifically aimed at Hispanic customers, two-thirds of whom use WhatsApp daily. More than 7,000 customers struck up a conversation with Wendy’s on WhatsApp, and 68% of them selected one of the digital offers, said Lauren Morton, manager, social and partnership engagement strategy, for Wendy’s.
Using WhatsApp as a marketing channel allowed Wendy’s to engage with customers in a more authentic way than traditional advertising allows, Morton said via email.
“We don’t just show up with an ad—we take the time to get to know our consumers, build a community around their interests, and hold real, authentic, 1:1 conversations with our audiences,” she said. “This framework of ‘making friends’ gives us permission to then ‘invite them to lunch’ at Wendy’s”—that is, encourage them to spend some money with the chain.
Wendy’s went on to create a WhatsApp digital sticker pack that users could download and use in conversations, and in August, it created a WhatsApp channel where it can chat with followers, allowing it to communicate at scale with its audience.
Brands can search for like-minded creators on Instagram's marketplace.
The creator economy
Meta is also working to connect restaurant brands with social media influencers, or “creators.”
These super-users have large followings (a minimum of 10,000 followers) and tend to post content within a certain niche, such as food, beauty or fashion. Because of their perceived authenticity and their high follower counts, they can be a powerful marketing tool for brands.
According to Meta data, users spent 2 trillion minutes with creator content on its apps in 2022. In a survey, 71% of consumers said they made a purchase within days after seeing creator content on Meta, and 60% said they trust what a creator says about a brand more than what a brand says about itself.
With that being the case, Meta is introducing more ways for brands to partner with creators and get in front of their large audiences.
For instance, restaurants can now run joint ads with creators under both the brand’s handle and the influencer’s.
And on Instagram, there is a creator marketplace where brands can essentially shop for creators by filtering for different audience attributes, such as age, interests and location. The marketplace also has an AI-driven recommendations tool that can help match brands with creators that make sense for their audience.
“There really is a creator for every type of person and brand,” said Brad Douglass, client solutions manager at Meta.