McDonald’s unveils plan for $1B ad business

Welcome back. There’s another high-intent ad channel on the horizon. McDonald’s has just unveiled plans to build a $1B ad business around its physical footprint and enormous customer base of 70 million. Meanwhile, McLaren decided to get in touch with its roots with its biggest visual overhaul in decades, and fans are roasting the redesign.

In Today’s Edition:

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1. McDonald’s unveils plan to turn your burger order into a $1B ad business: The fast-food giant is rolling out McDonald’s Media Network, selling ads across its app, kiosks, menu boards, and restaurants using data from over 70M daily customers. As US commerce-media spending heads toward $84B this year, McDonald’s is betting its enormous physical footprint and customer data can make advertising a major new revenue stream. Read about what this means for you here.

2. McLaren fans are fuming over its biggest rebrand in decades: The automaker has replaced its long-running italic wordmark with a cleaner all-caps design inspired by Bruce McLaren’s family garage in 1920s New Zealand. While some fans think such rebrands make sense when tied to a broader story, others have slammed the new look as generic and overly corporate (Exhibit A, Exhibit B). See the new logo announcement here and read some of the fan reactions here.

3. Pinterest rolls out new AI ad tools for performance marketers: The platform has unveiled ‘Visual Search Ads’, a new feature to help brands place sponsored products directly inside visual search results, while ‘Performance+’ adds A/B testing and product-prioritization controls. Pinterest says 640M people use the platform monthly, with more than half of searches tied to shopping. If true, it makes Pinterest a serious lower-funnel channel, especially for catching consumers before they’ve picked a brand.

✨ Brand New Rules: As AI tools flood the market, product features are easier than ever to copy. CMO and author Ana Andjelic argues that the rules for brand marketing have changed, and breaks down the real moat and how brands can overcome it.

🔧 Easy Fix: In a post that’s racked up over 1M views, marketer Rob Hoffman claims there’s a single overlooked page on your company website that can dramatically improve how AI tools describe your brand, and most marketing teams are sleeping on it. He also open-sources his full internal SOP to help you get started.

🍎 Apple Effect: Apple’s viral iPhone Duo campaign is still rippling through the internet, with creators trying to reverse-engineer the formula. a16z’s Justine Moore used GPT-6 Astra to market her cat like an Apple product, in a hilarious post that’s pulled in 1.5M views. Here’s her entire workflow. (76k likes)

🔥 Growth Recipe: A creator claims she uses a seven-prompt Claude workflow to power her entire content funnel, adding 253K followers in just four months. Each prompt maps to a different stage: attention, growth, conversion, and monetization. (5k likes)

🎞 It’s Showtime: Claude Opus 5.5 has barely been out for a week, and marketers are already spinning out eye-catching creatives. One creator used the model to produce stunning motion graphics, animations, and sound — all with one simple prompt.

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🛒 A new storefront? At its recent Made on YouTube event, the platform rolled out new shopping features for Ask YouTube, its conversational search tool. Now, product-review searches can return a comparison table of videos matched to viewer preferences — a natural extension for YouTube’s aggressive commerce push.

Well-structured product reviews are not only a shoppable storefront for humans, but data shows that they’re turning into citable reference documents for AI chatbots as well.

But these audiences don’t converge entirely. What earns a click by a human doesn’t always nab an AI citation.

The bottomline: As AI engines continue to rewrite their selection logic periodically, the brands that win will be the ones that stick to the underlying discipline (structured, genuinely useful video built to answer one question) as a durable bet, while recognizing that tactics for gaming citations have shorter shelf lives.

Sample Prompt: “Slow cinematic push-in toward the product as the camera arcs slightly from left to right. Keep the motion smooth and premium, with subtle environmental movement and a clean commercial feel.”

Until next time — Zain, Faiq, & the Superhuman AI team