This year, many of our favorite restaurant chains have committed to improving the customer experience through a myriad of business strategies. Burger King has taken a food-quality approach by changing recipes for major menu items, like the Whopper and Chicken Nuggets. Wendy’s is taking a marketing approach by creating a brand-new chief marketing and customer growth officer role for former McDonald’s senior vice president Tariq Hassan. And McDonald’s calls its prolonged strategy McDonald’s > Next, which aims to “be our customer’s first choice. Every time.”

McDonald’s highlighted its new initiative earlier this year, led by a new AI-powered ordering system called ArchIQ that the chain is currently testing at select restaurants—but that’s not the only recent change customers may have noticed.

McDonald’s Begins Testing Digital Ads on Drive-Thru Menus
McDonald’s is currently piloting a test at multiple company-owned restaurants that puts digital ads on its drive-thru menu boards. However, the ads aren’t for the newest menu items at the Golden Arches—they’re for external companies, such as Geico. McDonald’s began this test at 450 restaurants, according to Morgan Flatley, McDonald’s global chief marketing officer and executive vice president of new business ventures.

During testing, the advertisements appeared after the customer placed their order. It’s unconfirmed if this layout would stay the same if the digital ads made their way to all McDonald’s locations.

And this is only the beginning of a broader plan that was recently announced at McDonald’s Investor Day.

McDonald’s has announced the creation of McDonald’s Media Network, which it hopes to build into a $1 million business.

“Commerce media is one of the fastest-growing areas in advertising, and it’s expected to reach more than $100 billion in the U.S. alone by 2028,” Flatley said during the presentation. “It’s an opportunity to generate revenue for the system with little in the way of additional cost, no operational complexity, and no disruption to our customer experience.”

While the menu board change hasn’t rolled out to the chain’s roughly 14,000 locations just yet, customers are already expressing their disdain toward the move.

“Wow, McD’s just found another way to make the customer’s experience worse than it is now,” a Reddit user wrote. “It’s official I think I’m done with McDonald’s then. It’s like they just keep coming up with new ideas to make me want to go less and less,” commented another.

One Redditor assumed the new advertisements might not be just about extra money. “Sure the ad revenue is nice but I bet the real motive is to drive traffic to mobile ordering,” they wrote. Given that McDonald’s also announced plans to release a new tiered rewards system on its app, that theory might not be too far off.

Whatever the reason, though, your next trip to Mickey D’s might just include a word from a sponsor.