QSRs wasting money on Meta and Google

One of the backdrops that littered my walk to school in Brisbane’s West was the sight of over-stuffed letterboxes. Even as a child, I could sense that there was no point in adding to the kindling growing at the front of many houses. And yet, advertisers persisted.

Fast forward to today, and the pattern is repeating itself again. However, the waste has become more intangible, digitally lingering in glazed-over feeds. We need to consider our customers’ mental availability to remember your brand, as opposed to a competitor, when thinking about lunch, for example.

Our report into local area marketing (LAM) techniques found that many marketers have become frustrated with the over-saturation of digital channels. According to a market research firm, Meta and Google account for over 70% of digital advertising budgets in Australia, with no signs of slowing, as Meta is on track to overtake linear TV ad spending globally later this year.

Google and Facebook have made buying audiences on their platform so easy that anyone, from let’s say Bob’s Burgers in Noosa Heads QLD, can buy their ‘presumed’ target audience without any prior knowledge required. Simple. Except often, their cookie cutter audiences may overlap with yours, they may not have set limits, and they can blow an entire year’s budget all during the week before Christmas. Bad for them, and worse for everyone else whose CPMs just increased because of the FOMO that surrounds key sales periods.

Advertisers with a lack of experience in the space and on the platform will continue to throw fuel to this fire, adding to the clutter and competition, with only Meta benefiting.

One CMO confirmed: “We had an experience on one channel, where our costs tripled and our results weren’t there. Times are tough. So we have looked elsewhere—we can’t afford to waste money on a platform that doesn’t seem consistent anymore.”

The rise in automation across tech platforms that continue to prioritise profits over user and advertiser experience saw the pattern of enshittification named Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year in 2024. This drop in the quality of experience for users and results for local area marketers has been paired with a rise in price, now for diminishing returns. A research report said Meta’s reported cost per ad across its platform has risen 14% year-over-year, resulting in 90% SMBs in Australia using Facebook for their business dealing with CPMs around 10.31% higher on Facebook and Instagram than 2 years ago, according to the findings of our Ditching Digital Skip Bins report.

The report found that in response, marketers are returning to more traditional channels SMS, Digital OOH and pop-up/event marketing. One approach around mental availability is understanding and leveraging the cues that category buyers use to access their memories in buying situations, an important tool for any local area marketer.

Another example from one recent B2C store campaign highlights the benefit one organisation experienced when media was focused on SMS along with a VIP night for loyal customers. This activity resulted in an increase of 25% in revenue y-o-y. The CMO explained: “We’ve seen some great results from the real grassroots local area marketing, like localised SMS and email campaigns, with offers tailored to consumers. We did a VIP night for Christmas and saw two or three of our stores have their biggest revenue day ever (some have been around for 20 years). It’s a massive result to have your biggest revenue day ever as a result of local area marketing.”

For QSRs, it can be about mastering your contextual messaging through the proximity of Out Of Home (and its digital counterpart), as IAB’s Co-Chair of the DOOH Council, Brad Palmer, explains: “The power is to have limited wastage in your execution. Invest your marketing budget into locations which suit your audiences, and suit your time of day and budget you want to spend.”

Automation and efforts to become more efficient have led to marketing principles of measurement and effectiveness being sidelined for easy-to-deploy ‘cookie cutter’ personalisation tools. While automation platforms provide unparalleled access to information, when all rely on the same platforms, with the replica personas, differentiation becomes a distant hope; in essence, all of our efforts become a darker shade of AI.

So, against the backdrop of a fragmented digital landscape, with dwindling attention thanks to overexposure, marketers need to shift their mindset and approach to make LAM more effective.