McDonald's Looks To Emulate Amazon; Is S4 'Too Yesterday'?

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Dynamic Yield, the personalization technology McDonald’s acquired in March for $300 million, will help the fast-food chain customize its menus to store customers and app users. But the platform will also position McDonald’s to compete with digital giants – namely Amazon – by allowing it to collect more data on its customers, The Wall Street Journal reports. “We have a tremendous amount of data,” McDonald’s global chief information officer Daniel Henry said, highlighting information on drive-through line lengths and which menu items are trending. “We can start offering suggestions based on all of that information … And that data continues to get rich. It gets smarter and smarter with every customer interaction.” But why does a brick-and-mortar fast-food chain need that level of personalization? “Our customers are telling us this is an expectation they have, because this is the environment they’re dealing with in everyday life,” Henry said. More.

Tell It Like It Is

Rishad Tobaccowala, what do you think about Sir Martin Sorrell’s S4 venture? It’s “too small, too narrow and too yesterday,” Tobaccowala, chief growth officer at Publicis, declared Tuesday at the LUMA Partners Digital Media Summit in New York City. The future, he said, is not just about digital and data, it’s about omnichannel relationships and marketing. “I’d much rather basically be Accenture or Publicis than S4,” he said. OK, what about Facebook, Rishad? “Unless they manage to become the WeChat of the United States, which is their strategy, I think we have seen peak Facebook,” he said. “They have a hard time attracting talent, and they’re only focused on advertising.” And how do you feel about the current state of the marketing industry? “I think our industry broadly, including marketers, has lost the plot. As long as you optimize for the consumers, you’re basically optimizing for one segment of what a human is.”

The Third-Party Nightmare

Google’s move to restrict cookie tracking on Chrome could deal an indirect blow to Amazon by making it more difficult for ad buyers to target shoppers off of its platform. Without third-party cookies, Amazon can’t match its audiences off of its own site to retarget users, Digiday reports. “Third-party audiences are going to be a nightmare,” said Pedro Mona, iProspect’s managing director of platforms and engineering. “The volumes will decrease significantly. The ability to track their own audiences outside Amazon will go down.” Amazon doesn’t break out how much of its ad revenue comes from off of its platform, but Google’s privacy restrictions could hamper the explosive growth of its programmatic business. Agency buyers predict that Amazon will respond by pushing more aggressively into mobile apps, where cookies aren’t present, or work more directly with media owners. More.

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