Publicis Sapient’s Jackie Walker On The Value Prop, ROI And How-Tos Of QSR Digital Signage

I’ve yet to meet Jackie Walker in person, but in our chats over the phone and video, she’s quickly impressed me with her knowledge, insights and enthusiasm for digital signage.

Many of the people I’ve dealt with at big media companies speak an unfamiliar, very buzz-phrasey language that I barely grasp, but Jackie works for one of the biggest – Publicis Sapient – and speaks like normal people. Based in Houston, she’s the head of strategy for that giant agency’s work in what’s called dining and delivery. That puts her front and center in planning out and then executing things like digital menu displays and the overall ordering experience at major QSRs.

Drive-thrus and their digital displays were a big part of how many QSRs got through COVID lockdown periods – when in-store ordering was restricted – and now we’re seeing a lot of operators who didn’t have drive-thru adding that capability.

Jackie and I had a great chat about the value proposition and ROI model for drive-thru display technology – including mashing up a lot of things like loyalty apps, readers and other technologies to customize or optimize what consumers see when they get in front of screens.

If you sell into or service the QSR space, this is a valuable listen.

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TRANSCRIPT

Jackie, welcome. We’ve spoken in the past and know each other a bit. I don’t think we’ve actually met in person, and who does that any more? 

You work for Publicis Sapient, and you’ve been leading strategy for digital menu boards for a couple of big QSR brands. What does all that entail? 

Jackie Walker: Yeah, absolutely. Publicis Sapient, for those of your listeners who aren’t super familiar with us, we are a digital business transformation firm. So we work with many brands, many QSRs in particular, around how they can use digital to really optimize the way that they are connecting with their customers. It’s on a lot of fronts, there’s some mobile work, of course, loyalty work, customer relationship marketing, all of these suspects.

But I specifically have really been working very closely on digital menu boards which have been really interesting. The brands that I’ve been working with and I’ve now worked with five of the top twenty-five and different categories, right? A couple of the burger brands, a coffee brand, a chicken brand. What’s really interesting, I think, for these larger brands is that they’re really trying to push the envelope on what they’re trying to achieve with their digital menu boards. But nobody has really figured out how to do that yet. So when we go in on the strategy engagements, we’re really focused on the customer experience as a lens.

So the team is generally, me, a couple of strategists, a product manager sometimes, and a couple of UX people, so visual designers and user experience folks who can really think about the way you organize an experience for our customer to make it super easy, and we really look at three lenses, right? We look at where the brand is from a brand identity customer experience perspective. So as they think about how to transition from just translating a print menu, which is generally the way that this starts, right? How do you move from translating a print menu to actually thinking about broader digital capabilities? So we try to understand where they are with that. What’s their mobile experience? How do they think about this on their digital channels today? 

We think about where they are from a technology standpoint. So that’s really interesting work, right? Talking to their restaurant technology groups, sometimes their customer technology groups, trying to understand what they’re doing from a loyalty standpoint, where they are with the point of sale capability where they are with their digital menu board vendor. If they’re already down a path, so what are the capabilities they have and what do they don’t have, and really thinking about those lenses so that we can get to a view on where they go from a user experience standpoint and then also, how do they continue to push the envelope as they build in more and more digital capabilities? 

So you’ve talked about pushing the envelopes. When digital many boards first started being applied in larger QSR chains, it was all around the operational issues that changes could be made a lot more efficiently and you can do dayparting. I gather what you’re saying is the larger brands, at least in their heads, are way beyond that now? 

Jackie Walker: Yeah. It’s a funny thing, right? I think we’re still talking about some of those basics. Everybody thinks of Mcdonald’s as the gold standard, which makes sense. They’re the largest, they were the first to scale outdoors. But that’s recent, right? So they just finished their rollout in the US at the beginning of 2020. So it’s not actually that long ago that some of this hardware was being installed. So I think dayparting is still something that brands are very much thinking about. They’re thinking about how to leverage dayparting. So if you look at the McDonald’s menu, there are some obvious changes with the dayparts. You look at the background color, for example, breakfast is blue, lunch is yellow, dinner and late-night is black, right? That’s the most obvious, but if you squint, you can’t really tell the difference between the products that are laid out for lunch, dinner, and late at night. They’re doing very subtle things with reorganizing products, but they’re not really leaning into that capability yet.

So as brands are starting to think about dayparting, thinking more about. What can you do from a business perspective with that? Can you do promotions that are specific to a time of day, right? Can you have a special late-night menu that has different pricing on some of your most snackable items, as an example, do you play with brand voice? 

So some of these QSR brands really have quite playful brand identities. You think that some of these brands could have a really fun and differentiated late-night experience versus what they’re trying to accomplish during lunchtime, that would be consistent with their brand. So still thinking about that, I think now the big thing is loyalty, and so with loyalty and I keep beating the drum on this one, that is really going to fundamentally change the drive-thru experience. Again, McDonald’s pushing the envelope here. 

They completed their national loyalty rollout in July, in the US, which is their largest market, and what’s sneaky, and I don’t know if everyone’s recognized it is now in McDonald’s app, you can actually set it up so that when you go through the drive-thru, you can pay with your stored credit card via your app. So you go to the window, just you go up to the menu board, just like you normally would, you talk to the crew member, you place your order. You give them this code, and now it’s applying loyalty points. It’s using any coupons or offers or points redemptions that you’ve applied but it also does the payment through that mobile interface, which is really interesting. It’s subtle but if you think about the experience of a customer, they don’t have to go to the pay window anymore at all. You’ve just really streamline that. You don’t have to hand your credit card out through the window. You avoid all of that kind of silliness. So I think that’s a really interesting change, and I think other brands are really going to be forced to emulate that, and that’s going to be a huge shift. 

Yeah, and that’s part of it, right? If you have a lot of active use of your loyalty app, also blends payment in there when they get into the drive-thru lane long before they even get to the presale window, a system like what McDonald’s bought with that Israeli company Dynamic Yield is that they pick that stuff up, they know that Jackie’s back in and she’s got her kids with her maybe or whatever, and when you get to the presale and when you get to the order window, they can dynamically recast that menu to suit your preferences or what they think might be your preferences and how they can upsell you on stuff?

Jackie Walker: That’s where it’s headed, yeah. So no one is really doing that particularly effectively yet, but that is absolutely where it’s headed. The challenge that a lot of these brands are still working on is customer identification, and we’ve been talking about that for so long, we used to talk about license plate recognition, still talk about Bluetooth. How do you figure out who’s in the car? Are you creepy and use cameras? What are you doing? So brands are really still experimenting and figuring out what is the best tech for that. McDonald’s right now is just doing a shortcode so the customer still has to do some work, they have to open their app, they have to see that code, they read it to the crew, right? Code is different every time. So you have to actually look to see it, in that transaction, what your code is. 

But certainly even testing Bluetooth, DNKN is interesting. DNKN’s been partnering with a company called Blue Dot not so secretly, which does pretty advanced geolocation. So they’re actually using really tight geofencing to trigger customer identification and doing some customer greeting based on that. 

So it would actually say, “Hi Dave, or Hey Jackie”?

Jackie Walker: Exactly, which is, I think still a questionable use case, right? 

Yeah. People will start looking in the rearview mirror and go, “okay, who’s following me?” 

Jackie Walker: Yeah, exactly. My favorite actually is not the “Hi Dave!” at the beginning, but the “Thanks, Dave!” at the end of the transaction like that’s been a topic is how do you personalize that screen at the very end of the order confirmation, which is funny because if you actually sit in a drive-thru for a while and watch, which I do, because that’s part of my job as the digital menu board super-nerd.  

“Who’s that strange woman standing in the parking lot?” (Laughter) 

Jackie Walker: Oh God, Dave, I have so many funny stories. My husband always makes fun of me. It’s like, “Excuse me, there’s a suspicious woman in leggings and a Volvo in the drive-thru!”

It’s yeah, it’s funny. But you realize that most customers have already driven away by the time that thank you sign presents anything, so they’re not seeing that. So if you’re investing a bunch of time and energy figuring out how you’re personalizing that screen, all you’re really doing is creeping everybody out because you’re showing the next customer in line, the previous customer’s information.

That’s an interesting thing, and then Tim Horton’s is playing with scanners. So actually installing QR scanning hardware in the drive-thru lane, the customer opens their app, has the QR code open, and scans on the scanner, which I’m intrigued to see how that’s going to go. I think there are definitely some pretty strong cons with that in terms of that hardware investment is not going to be small, and then, we’ve all done grocery checkout, self-checkout, and you try to scan something even in good lighting, that can be quite challenging. So now you have a mobile phone trying to scan in direct sun. I’m predicting, there’ll be some challenges with that. 

In Canada with snow and -30 and everything else. 

Jackie Walker: Yep. Sticking your hand out the phone with a big mitten on.

Edmonton in February doing that. I’m not sure it was going to be a big take-up, but you never know. 

Jackie Walker: So I think, brands are, to go back to the original question, what are they doing? There are still a few basics, right? Let’s figure out how we’re going to identify the customer. Let’s build that foundation. It’s really about how we’re going to use dayparting more effectively really, gets the promise of that, suggestive selling is another area. That’s quite interesting. So we’ve been using those examples in the industry for 10 years. Show ice cream when it’s hot out, show hot coffee when it’s cold out, but now the technology is definitely there to do much more sophisticated things.

So that’s where things like McDonald’s dynamic yield do come into play in a big way, is making some suggestions for customers that go well beyond what you could do with rules-based kind of recommendations, and then now it’s like let’s start using our imagination and getting creative. 

What does personalization look like if you know a customer, do you make it really easy to reorder recent items? That’s a great benefit for both the operator and the customer, right? So if you show somebody buys their Whopper Jr., mine is no pickle, no Mayo, with cheese, if you know that I order that every single time you show that on the board and you just say, I want my Whopper Jr. my way, and there’s a POS integration for the crew member to hit one button. You just saved a bunch of time, and really provided some additional value for the customer. So I think those types of executions are going to be really interesting.

Certainly in places like Canada, where you have a pretty substantial number of commuters who would go into a Tim Horton’s every morning and they’re going to order their Double Double or whatever it is, and they’re not going to move off of that because that’s what gets them on the road. To be able to just know that, okay, Dave’s here and he’s gotten his Double Double, and there’s nothing involved other than payment, or maybe even not that if if you flash your phone right away.

Jackie Walker: Absolutely. Yeah, it’s really powerful, and it’s those moments, I think that are going to be the most interesting or where there’s clear value to the customer and there’s clear value to the operator, right? Everyone benefits from that kind of investment. 

Is that seamlessness a big part of it where there are different systems and it all just works and it makes your drive-thru experience better?

Jackie Walker: That is I think the kind of gold standard and that’s where it’s headed. I think it’s really interesting, for a long time, brands were buying digital menu boards and it was really, they’re buying a piece of hardware, especially outdoor because everybody’s really terrified about making this big hardware investment. You really focus on the hardware and then you get some software along for the ride and you hope that the software has the out-of-box capabilities that you need to do what you want to do with it. 

I think now more and more brands are recognizing that that’s not really how it’s going to work for them. It’s really about creating this customized experience that can integrate with their systems. It can integrate with their point of sale. It can integrate with their loyalty program. It can integrate with their master product data. These are really powerful benefits to an integrated system, that is software first and experience first and the hardware is just supporting it. 

I’m curious about drive-thru right now because of COVID. Prior to COVID, the idea of selling drive-thru was that it could do all these things, here’s the value proposition, and so on, and it was being marketed that way. 

With COVID and the inability, at least in some jurisdictions, to even go inside to dine and order stuff, if you didn’t have to the drive-thru, you were in a world of pain in terms of operating your business. Has that deferred the whole idea, that you could do all these things with it and just made it operational for the moment, or at least in the past year, we needed to put in drive-thru just so we could do transactions and sell food?

Jackie Walker: Yeah, I think that was a huge benefit for QSR. You think about the drive-thru that was pre-built for COVID, it’s the ultimate kind of contactless almost service method. So I think quick-serve has a huge advantage over other types of restaurants, even if you think about fast-casual where some of them may have had drive-thru or curbside pick up, but that was a very small part of their business, whereas quick service has been trying to optimize drive-thru for years and years, and spend a lot of time and energy and money investing in ways to make that channel more seamless.

I wonder what’s different now, and exciting is that the emphasis for a long time has been on the operational aspects of drivers. So how do you improve the speed of service and how do you improve order accuracy? Those are the two big things, and how do you drive throughput? Now there’s this question and I think loyalty is a big part of the impetus for that. How do you create meaningful customer interaction? So not only how are you getting the customer the food they want, at the speed you want to get it to them and they want it to go. But how do you actually provide some additional value in that interaction and provide a differentiated experience? Which is exciting! 

How would that work and look? 

Jackie Walker: Yeah. So I think one of the things that’s different about quick-service restaurants is that they still have a very large portion of their customers that are cash customers. You think about Starbucks, they’ve been extraordinarily successful at getting a ton of customers to just use mobile order pay and it’s easy peasy. And then the challenge from an operation standpoint is just how do you get those mobile orders customers served quickly. 

QSRs are going to have a steeper hill to climb with that. They’re trying to drive digital adoption. They’re trying to drive known customer rates, like what percentage of their customers do they actually know that are registered customers or credit cards that they can attribute to a customer. But that behavior of people is gonna start on mobile ordering everything. So far, there’s not really any evidence that there’s going to be consistent. Customers like deals and offers that provide a lot of value. But if there’s a way that you can hook into deals and offers without the customer actually having to complete the transaction in the mobile app, that’s really powerful. Drive-thru is all about impulse. I can just pull in and grab my thing and go, and I don’t have to think about it. I don’t have to sit here go through the fifteen steps and in a mobile app to order. So I think it’s really going to be that balance between bringing forward that enhanced digital capability with loyalty, which includes reordering, personalized offers. It includes all of those things and bringing that to bear in the drive-thru lane itself, and the menu board becomes a very powerful tool in reinforcing those value adds. 

If your customer is asking questions in the drive-thru you’re in big trouble, right? So if you have a loyal customer, they don’t know that you’ve registered with them, but you know it’s them that’s there, or they can’t tell that you applied their points the way that they thought the points were going to get applied, to get a free ice cream cone you really create some significant operational challenges. So menu boards, I think, are becoming more and more of a tool to be able to reinforce to customers that you’ve got their back and things are going to be accurate in the way that they expect them to be. That’s super powerful.

Is there an easily defined, easily sold, and easily acknowledged ROI model now for these drive-thru displays? Because by and large, they are being put in by the local franchise owner, not the head office, so that there’s a significant $10-30k infrastructure investment to do this, and local operators are looking at this one and going, “I didn’t save for that,” or, “Why would I do this?” or “What am I going to see?” 

Jackie Walker: Yeah, I will say that there does seem to be a pretty big sea change with regard to the franchisee’s state of mind when it comes to this investment. I think there’s real acceptance and I’ve worked with a couple of brands now where the initiative is spearheaded at the brand level, right? There’s much more power when it comes from the brand and that capability is built centrally. The franchisees are just footing the bill for installation in their individual restaurant or set of restaurants but the franchisees are basically saying, let’s go faster. How fast can I get this thing installed? And, they can’t go as fast as the franchisees want them to go. 

I think what’s interesting with the ROI model, in the early days, the math worked better for indoor because the capital investment indoors is a lot cheaper. There’s a little bit of the cost savings of printing and having people up on ladders and the liability that goes along with that, the inflexibility of print. You could make a pretty good case for the return on investment with those indoor boards on cost alone. With drive-thru, your capital investment is quite a bit higher because the hardware has to be much more rugged to be able to withstand that outdoor environment.

I think what is shifting is now the value prop is not just about the cost savings and the increased flexibility. But it’s also about the direct upside. So now that you have these additional digital capabilities, how do you actually build a customer’s check by adding capabilities that are unique to digital? So getting really strong with the way you’re using day partying or really thinking about suggestive selling and how do you do that in a consistent way, which is really driving. How do you encourage customers toward your more premium menu items? And you can get quite sophisticated in the way that you use that channel to build checks.

Is there an acknowledged metric around that? So pulling this out of my head, if you make this investment, it should pay for itself in the first 18 months or the first 26 months or whatever it is? 

Jackie Walker: Yeah, the economics depend a little bit on the restaurant, but generally the kind of rule of thumb has been, you’re going to get like a 3% to 5% lift just by moving from analog boards to digital because the customer experience is just much better. I think the challenge is that wears off eventually is your customers get used to digital. You don’t have that Disney effect on the third visit and fourth visit. But over time, it’s all about driving that incrementality and the numbers are hard there, Dave, because a lot of people don’t want to share. The brands don’t want to share how successful or not successful their suggestive sales capabilities are. But generally speaking, it’s all about driving that ticket over time, and then you can do the work back on the break-even time. 

But I think in general, what you said 18 to 24 months is in most cases probably about right. 

And I’m sure as in many things, the other QSR operators, regardless of category or size, pay very close attention to what the giants do, like a McDonald’s and if they’re doing a full rollout across their whole estate, across the United States, they’re not doing that for giggles and they’ve thought this through?

Jackie Walker: Absolutely. With the ROI model, part of it is, what is the direct benefit, from an economic standpoint, but then the other part of it is very much keeping up with the Joneses kind of mentality or keeping up with the McDonalds in this case. How do you actually ensure that you’re meeting customer expectations because once customers get used to that slick experience, you pull into a random Taco Bell with a ten-year-old backlit WITH half of them are blown out and they’re all scratched up and dingy, customers do notice that stuff? So I think there is a little bit of just leveling up that guest experience and it is going to be contagious. 

All the big brands are really starting to think about how they do this, and I think now with the price of hardware coming down and the big players converting, so McDonald’s is already there, RBI is rolling out across Burger King, Popeye’s, and Tim Horton’s, they’re going to be the next big player to reach scale. It’s really just a matter of when, and not if everyone’s going to go digital on these drivers. 

So let’s talk about inside the store. We talked mostly about drive-thru displays, but inside the store, digital menu boards have been around a lot longer, but they’re changing too because you’re going to see a lot more service ordering and a lot more pickup and you need digital menu boards that have to also function as queue management or notification, right? 

Jackie Walker: Yeah. So I think what’s happening is there’s actually a proliferation of use cases if you want to think about it that way. So the digital menu board at the front counter is really just about providing a menu to customers that are in the restaurant and you’re right, it’s pretty well understood. I think that’s interesting when I talk to customers about drive-thru, they get really excited about its personalization, and the word I always pushed to use is optimization even more than personalization because you get the benefit for unknown guests as well.

But once you get that working like a well-oiled machine, you start to understand customer behavior at the store level, you can actually apply those same principles at the front counter, right? So you’re not targeting your messaging to an individual customer because that front counter board is meant to be a one-to-many experience, but you can 100% tailor that experience to the restaurant. So you can curate the menu for the types of purchase behavior that exists in that store or that type of store. So I think the front counter is going to continue to evolve, with regards to that, to become a little bit more curated benefiting from the investment at the drive-thru. 

The kiosk is another huge piece. I laugh and I think we’ve talked about this before, when COVID started everyone thought, oh my God, it’s like the death of kiosks, nobody’s ever going to touch it, touch screen ever again. But actually, it’s done quite the opposite as we’ve understood better, that face-to-face is much worse than touching a screen and using some hand sanitizer. But what’s interesting is that from a rollout perspective. Brands still think of kiosks as very different from menu boards, which I find fascinating. The way that it ends up shaking out is, brands think about their mobile experience and most brands are furthest along on mobile ordering. Then when they think about kiosks, it’s the app, but on a big screen and a lot of brands actually manage it that way. So it’s not the in-store tech groups that are managing that kiosk, it’s actually the digital groups, the customer experience, technology groups that are delivering them.

And then you have the menu boards and they are very much firmly still in the restaurant technology side of the house. So there are different problems to solve altogether. I think more and more, there’s going to be a little bit of consolidation across that. I always encourage customers to think about as you’re doing drive-thru, you’re building these mechanisms from a backend standpoint to actually deliver curated content and be smart in how you’re merchandising product dynamically. There’s absolutely a play for that on front counter boards and a play for that on kiosks, and the kiosk is after all another piece of in-store hardware, and then to your point, Dave, there are these other use cases, right? 

So are brands going to start to put more queue management screens up like McDonald’s has, where they have now served these customer numbers and they have the list for in-store and list for mobile. Do they start to do some things with digital displays near pickup areas as more and more customers are starting to use take-out options? I’ve even heard some thought around, are there going to be digital screens at mobile pickup? I’m still not sold on that one. Like a sign made out of metal does just great for, telling you a customer where they need to park. We’ll see who’s able to first define a use case that has a clear ROI for putting screens at those parking spots. 

The last thing I wanted to ask about was some fundamentals around digital menu boards. One of the things that I’ve found through the years and seems to be getting better as people learn is you have these eye charts that they try to cram so much stuff into a single display that you really can’t read anything and it’s mentally overwhelming, you look at it and go, oh my God, I’ll just order the thing that I’ve got in my head and get the hell out of here. 

Is that sort of thing important? Color choices, font choices, certainly the volume of text, the size or point size, all those things?

Jackie Walker: 100%. Yes, and I think I’m glad you asked this question because this is my favorite question, right? If you look at how most of the brands: McDonald’s is a good example, Burger King is a good example. It looks like the problem they’ve been trying to solve is how do you jam all the shit that you had on six panels print now on to two or three digital screens. Like if you just look at it, you can see that’s what they thought they were trying to do. Really the opportunity with digital menu boards is to get more precise about what the content is because you can have advanced analytics, you can link what you display to a customer to a transaction. You can start to have a much better data-driven merchandising strategy. So you can really think about the use case for the drive-thru, which to your point is you have a customer that’s freaked out, they’re going to be in front of that board for probably 10-15 seconds looking at it at a peak time before they start talking or the crew member starts talking to them. So if you’re trying to show them 85 SKUs, there is no way that any human is understanding 85 SKUs in 10-15 seconds. So the opportunity is really about curation, and I think when we approach menu board design, we don’t think about it from an old-school menu sings print menu point of view. We think about it from a digital frame of reference. 

How do you guide wayfinding for a customer? How do you establish a kind of system design and a foundation that’s going to allow the operator of the brand to substitute products in and out and see how they perform when they’re in these different slots? Think about designing a poster, you think about designing a digital framework. I think curation is key. That’s that to me really all of these personalization tactics that you talk about, it really comes back to how do I show less stuff that’s more meaningful and the tactics are all different ways of getting at that problem. So I think that’s what’s most exciting about the move to digital menu boards is we can start playing there and as an industry get much smarter about how you actually serve the customer at that moment? How do you show them the least amount of information to get them through success? Either help them get what they wanted to get, they knew they wanted, or inspire them to try something new. Build tickets, improve their level of confidence. These are all the things that become front and center in this new digital menu board experience.

All right. Super interesting. I appreciate you taking the time. 

Jackie Walker: Lots of fun. Dave, always looking forward to talking to you soon and maybe meeting you in person. 

Yes. If we ever travel once again and do things like Trade Shows. 

Jackie Walker: Amen. Thanks so much, Dave.