Commentary

QSR Media Planning and the New Hunger Journey

Chipotle finally has a loyalty program. "It's almost a startup mentality," said Lori Cassorla, VP, Associate Media Director, Mediahub (second from right), about her client. "We're bringing ourselves back into the conversation."

Cassorla was part of a panel discussion on Thursday along with moderator Angela Yang, Vice President of Growth, T3; Kalyn Asher, President, Asher Media, and Sean McCormick, Senior Media Director, Harmelin Media.

Chipotle's loyalty program is expected to create a lot of data through which Cassorla said they'll be "focusing on segmenting out subsets of consumers, retargeting them based on frequency of visit." They're also using location-based targeting in part for competitive conquesting.

In the digital space, she said they are "dynamic lite. We're targeting based on specific meal times, customer's search history, we have an always-on layer of search and programmatic display to target people lower down in the funnel.

"From a nation video standpoint, we're focused on the brand message, getting the brand story out there. [Chipotle says,] 'If everyone could just see morning prep at a Chipotle, we would win.' It's like a farmer's market in there. We're trying to get that message out there. How long does that message need to be? Are people interested in this? 

"For our loyalty campaign, we used national video, and even tested cinema. We were using that high-level national video player as more of a branding play. Our search and programmatic is dynamic lite. We want to do it, it is really our next iteration.

"Addressable TV is that shiny object that's everybody wants to use and test. We've looked into it a lot for Chipotle. We don't have a place in our plan right now." With more first-party data from the new loyalty program, though, they may. "You're paying a premium to target a specific audience, so you want to get the right message out there.

"How we can use data to target people on an identity level, figuring out what the right use case is for that. How to use that data, is there scale there. As that develops, it excites me, especially from a QSR standpoint."

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