Plein Air co-CEO Paul McEnany joined the Ovation podcast to talk through how restaurant brands
should think about advertising spend, and where measurement usually breaks down.

The recurring problem

Restaurant advertising sits awkwardly between two measurement worlds. Digital ordering produces
clean attribution for the portion of demand that converts online, while the majority of visits
still happen in a store where the connection between the ad and the order is inferred rather than
observed. Brands end up over-crediting the channels that report well and under-investing in the
ones that move traffic they cannot see.

That asymmetry is not a data problem so much as a budgeting one. The channel with the better
dashboard wins the next quarter’s money regardless of which channel actually drove the visit.

Elsewhere

Plein Air also produces Fries & Grind
(Apple Podcasts), and earlier
episodes are archived under
Tastemakers.

Listen to the Ovation episode: ovationup.com.