Carl’s Jr. And Hardee’s Marketing Goes Regional With Amazon Ads’ Streaming Media

Recorded: March 23, 2026, 7 p.m.

Original

Summarized

Carl’s Jr. And Hardee’s Marketing Goes Regional With Amazon Ads’ Streaming Media | AdExchanger

image/svg+xml:

Topics
Latest
Marketers
Agencies
Publishers
Technology
Platforms
Identity
Measurement
Data Privacy
Artificial Intelligence
CTV
Commerce
AdExplainer
Exclusive Report
Daily News Roundup

Opinion
All Columns
Data-Driven Thinking
On TV & Video
The Sell Sider
Content Studio
Comic
Contributor Guidelines

About Us
Advertise
Newsletter
AdExchanger Advisory Board
About Us
Contact Us

Events
Programmatic AI Las Vegas
AdExchanger Awards
Webinars
All Events
Network Events

Podcasts
AdExchanger Talks
The Big Story
Inside the Stack

NEW! Programmatic AI 2026

Become an AdHero

Topics
Latest
Marketers
Agencies
Publishers
Technology
Platforms
Identity
Measurement
Data Privacy
Artificial Intelligence
CTV
Commerce
AdExplainer
Exclusive Report
Daily News Roundup

Opinion
All Columns
Data-Driven Thinking
On TV & Video
The Sell Sider
Content Studio
Comic
Contributor Guidelines

Events & Awards
Programmatic AI Las Vegas
AdExchanger Awards
Webinars
All Events
Network Events

Podcasts
AdExchanger Talks
The Big Story
Inside the Stack

Subscribe Free
Sign Up

About Us
Advertise
Newsletter
AdExchanger Advisory Board
About Us
Contact Us

CONNECT

Home Marketers Carl’s Jr. And Hardee’s Marketing Goes Regional With Amazon Ads’ Streaming Media

Marketers
Carl’s Jr. And Hardee’s Marketing Goes Regional With Amazon Ads’ Streaming Media By James Hercher

Monday, March 23rd, 2026 – 12:12 pm
SHARE:

The age-old question for streaming TV advertisers is how to target the viewers they want while reaching the scale their businesses need.
The quick-serve restaurant operator CKE, which owns Carl’s Jr., Hardee’s and the Red Burrito and Green Burrito brands, initially dealt with the challenge of targeting and scale by consolidating marketing under one national account. The consolidation helped them gain efficiency from the greater total budget. That was the idea, at least.
But in the past couple of years the company has split back into a more regional focus, where specific restaurant chains are responsible for their own marketing in their own territories, said Scott Sutton, CKE’s director of media.
The regional focused is based on where each restaurant chain is clustered. Carl’s Jr. locations are mostly in the Western US, while more of Hardee’s locations are in the Midwest and on the East Coast.
What that means for CKE media buyers is that there is a greater focus on finding pockets of media or particular channels that can deliver scale, while also targeting within a state or market and layering in additional data. Sutton said this evolution in the marketing approach by the company led to a case study published on Monday between CKE, Amazon Ads and Attain, a marketing and retail data seller.

Streaming TV ads are very attractive, since the ad platforms can scour for particular audiences or households, Sutton said. But they aren’t so effective when limited to a state or market, he added, and many platforms don’t even enable that kind of targeting by state.
To convince franchisees to get on board with more streaming TV ads, CKE’s marketing org needed to prove that the buys pay off to local restaurants and chains. Buying ads during NFL games is an obvious strategy that moves the needle across the country, Sutton said. And Amazon’s Thursday Night Football broadcasts were part of the Amazon Ads test.
But one of the attractive opportunities, he said, was that people who’d seen an NFL commercial for a restaurant in their region could be retargeted by Amazon Ads elsewhere in placements that made more sense for a particular brand. The company has a NASCAR sponsorship, for instance, he said, which is very effective for brand-building for Carl’s Jr. in the southwest. Spots during soccer games work better for its East Coast chain, Hardee’s.
“We have a unique footprint with brands on the West Coast and East Coast, so for us to be able to buy an entire property and split it up just the way that we want really makes a difference,” Sutton said.
A national cable feed can be parsed and targeted to a degree, he added, “but it’s super expensive to break it up, and it’s really not worth it.”
The retail data seller Attain enters the equation as a reliable way to gauge an immediate local ROI on behalf of franchisees.
CKE has used location-based foot traffic data in the past, Sutton said. But foot traffic data is heavily modeled, he added, and in a total black box. Having tested providers, he said there can be important differences between providers, like if one relies too much on Android data and another misses Android entirely.
The company sought credit card data that indicates someone came into a restaurant and made an actual purchase. For this, the brand added Attain, which owns its own network of apps, including the shopping rewards app Merryfield, the cash advance app Klover and a rewards-for-receipts shopping app called Frisbee.
For CKE, the question isn’t just “Did this media or data work?”
Sutton said the focus has to be on whether the investment was worth it.
“You’re paying all these extra layers for your ad tech,” he said. “You’re paying for targeting, for contextualization, for premium this and premium that.”
And then there’s the measurement plan, which one pays for to see if everything panned out.
The question becomes, “Is it worth the incremental cost to do all this targeting that you can do?” Sutton posited. “And the answer is: Sometimes, but you’ve got to find those opportunities.”

Tagged in:

Amazon ads

//
Attain

//
Case Study

//
CKE

//
commerce

//
CTV

//
featured

//
QSR

//
streaming ads

//
streaming media

Next In Marketers

The Rise Of Principal Media And The End Of The Agencies As We Knew Them

Related Stories

Marketers
How Shutterfly Used A Search-Powered Custom Algorithm To Zoom In On New Customers

Marketers
OMD Shares Its Alternative ID Strategy At AdExchanger's Programmatic IO

Marketers
Scope3-Backed Contextual AI Platform Classify Aims To Disrupt Curation

Marketers
Albertsons Launches New Off-Site Click-to-Cart Tech

Must Read

CTV
America’s Test Kitchen Puts Direct And Programmatic Access On Its Menu

America’s Test Kitchen introduced direct and programmatic buying for its free ad-supported TV channels – marking the first time it’s selling ad inventory as a standalone package.

Marketers
The Rise Of Principal Media And The End Of The Agencies As We Knew Them

Ad agency holding companies are among the most adaptable businesses out there. In recent years holdcos like Publicis, WPP and Omnicom-IPG have stretched our notions of what an agency business even is exactly.

Artificial Intelligence
How One Agency Startup Uses Real-Time Data To Develop Real-Time Ads

Audience preferences are constantly evolving. So why not ads that evolve in real time, too? No, really.

Marketers
MyFitnessPal Wants To Start The Health And Wellness Subsector Of Retail Media

MyFitnessPal has just announced the launch of a data-driven advertising business that draws on its wealth of user-provided meal planning, fitness and nutrition data.

Measurement
Smartly Is Planning To Acquire INCRMNTAL Within The Next Few Weeks

Smartly is acquiring INCRMNTAL, an incrementality measurement startup founded in Tel Aviv in 2019 that focuses on causal lift rather than user-level tracking.

Marketers
Viant Had A Good Q4, But Still Needs To Punch Up At Bigger Platforms

Viant reported its Q4 and full-year 2025 earnings on Wednesday evening and investors appeared pleased.

Popular

CTV
America’s Test Kitchen Puts Direct And Programmatic Access On Its Menu

America’s Test Kitchen introduced direct and programmatic buying for its free ad-supported TV channels – marking the first time it’s selling ad inventory as a standalone package.

Marketers
The Rise Of Principal Media And The End Of The Agencies As We Knew Them

AdExplainer
What Does A Beta Test Of A Sell-Side Agent Look Like?

Now, publishers are exploring automation and optimization through agentic AI. Many publishers have identified a similar use case: sales agents who actively make decisions in the auction on behalf of the publisher.

PODCAST: The Big Story
The Media Spend Skim

Principal-based buying is on the rise, and it’s causing conflict between agencies and ad tech partners. Plus: What are sell-side agents, and how could they help publishers?

AdExchanger Content Studio
The End Of Easy Measurement: Building An Evidence-Based System For Marketing ROI

Marketers are projected to have invested nearly $400 billion in US media in 2025, based on estimates from MAGNA and eMarketer. About half of that will go toward finding new customers. Yet, as marketing investment grows, clarity on what actually drives ROI and growth continues to shrink. The loss of third-party identifiers, rising privacy restrictions and closed ecosystems have made it harder to see what’s working.

Join the AdExchanger Community
Join Now

Your trusted source for in-depth programmatic news, views, education and events.
AdExchanger is where marketers, agencies, publishers and tech companies go for the latest information on the trends that are transforming digital media and marketing, from data, privacy, identity and AI to commerce, CTV, measurement and mobile.

NEXT EVENT
Programmatic AI
May 18-20, 2026Park MGM, Las Vegas
Learn More

ABOUT ADEXCHANGER
About Us
Advertise
Contact Us
Events
Subscribe
RSS
Cookie Settings
Privacy & Terms
Accessibility
Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging

CONNECT

Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s have undergone a strategic shift in their marketing approach, moving away from a centralized national campaign towards a more regionally focused strategy, spearheaded by Scott Sutton, CKE’s director of media. This evolution, driven by the brand’s geographically dispersed restaurant chains – primarily Western US for Carl’s Jr. and the Midwest and East Coast for Hardee’s – necessitates a nuanced targeting methodology. The company initially consolidated marketing under a single national account, seeking efficiency through a larger budget, but this proved less effective than a segmented approach.

Central to this new strategy is a partnership with Amazon Ads and Attain, a retail data seller, to optimize ROI for franchisees. The rationale rests on the ability of streaming TV ad platforms, such as Amazon Ads, to precisely target viewers based on location and demonstrated interests, a capability not always consistently offered by broader national cable feeds. The brand leverages its existing NASCAR sponsorship for Carl’s Jr. in the southwest and soccer game placements for Hardee’s on the East Coast, demonstrating how location-specific targeting can drive effectiveness.

A key element of this repositioning is the incorporation of location-based foot traffic data, sourced through Attain’s network of apps – Merryfield, Klover, and Frisbee – to validate media investments. CKE recognizes the limitations of traditional foot traffic modeling and prioritizes data that provides a granular understanding of actual customer behavior, differentiating itself from providers relying heavily on Android data. This data—specifically credit card transactions—allows for a more accurate assessment of the incremental impact of advertising efforts. The decision to pay for a measurement plan underscores the increased cost associated with the layered targeting approach, highlighting the need to identify opportunities where the investment is justified.

Sutton emphasizes the value of finding “those opportunities” within the complex advertising landscape, acknowledging the significant expenses involved in targeting, contextualization, and premium ad tech. The shift reflects a pragmatic recognition that broad-based national campaigns are less efficient given the brand’s fragmented regional footprint, highlighting the need to utilize data-driven insights to maximize return on investment.