At some point in a co-op meeting, a franchisee asks a version of this question: what did the national ad fund buy in my market, and what did it do for my store?
It's a question that most reporting systems simply can't answer.. Franchise advertising disclosures are built to show how the money was divided across production, media placement and administration, and they do that job well. What they were never organized to show is where any of it went geographically, which is the only thing the franchisee is actually asking about.
National and co-op media gets bought at the DMA level, because that's how broadcast, CTV and most programmatic inventory is organized and priced, but the franchisee asking the question, “what’s working in my market?” runs a single store whose customers mostly come from a few minutes' drive away. Nothing automatically translates between those two units, so the reconciliation either gets done by hand for one specific market or it doesn't get done at all.
Jeffrey Lentz of Elevated Franchise Marketing put the mechanical version of this plainly in QSR Magazine: "Broad programmatic optimizations guide the national budget, eventually steering most, if not all, marketing dollars toward DMAs with the largest population." The optimizer is behaving correctly when it does that, since dense markets really are where impressions are cheapest to deliver. But the franchisee in the smaller market contributed the same percentage of sales as everybody else did, and explaining that an algorithm made an efficient decision is not the same as telling him what his money bought.
In 2024, Papa John's raised its national marketing fund from 5% to 6% of sales, eliminated the 3% mandatory local spend requirement, and lost its co-ops in the process. On paper it was a reasonable trade, since franchisees owed less in total marketing spend and more of the budget sat where it could be planned centrally.
CEO Todd Penegor has since called it a big miss. By early 2026 the company had rebuilt marketing co-ops across 50 US markets, which now account for nearly half of North American systemwide sales.
What the co-ops had been providing, on top of the ad buying itself, was a group of operators in a specific market who decided how money got spent there and who had to answer for it afterward. Centralizing the budget made planning much simpler, but it also meant nobody in any particular market could explain what happened there. Two years later the company put the structure back, which tells you the accountability and local knowledge was worth more than the convenience.
Start with delivery, because it's the cheapest thing to produce. Pull the geographic report for one month of your programmatic and CTV buys, broken out by postal code, which every DSP will give you. Lay it against the postal codes that contain or border your restaurants and calculate what share of delivered impressions landed somewhere you have no store. For a sense of what that number means, the ANA's programmatic transparency study found roughly 23% of open-web programmatic spend going to waste across the advertisers it examined, though that covered 21 advertisers across all verticals and nobody has ever published an equivalent audit of restaurant media.
Then run the comparison the franchisee is actually making, which isn't about waste at all. Take each market's share of the impressions delivered and set it beside that market's share of what was contributed to the fund. Both figures already exist in your systems, since you have delivery by geography and sales by store. In any nationally bought plan those two percentages will diverge, because population density and contribution are simply different distributions, and a market that puts in 4% of the fund while receiving 1% of the delivery isn't an accounting error. It is, however, something the operator in that market deserves to hear named rather than work out for themselves.
Markets never get identical support, which means your system already contains variation nobody designed: markets that carried a campaign heavily, markets that got it thinly, markets that sat a flight out altogether. Compare what transactions did across those groups over the same weeks and you've stopped reporting delivery and started estimating what the delivery caused.
Lastly, report all of it in the co-op's unit rather than the media plan's. One page per market showing what that market contributed, what got delivered there, and what happened to transactions.
The first two of those moves need nothing but reports you already have. The third and fourth are where brands usually stall, because connecting delivered impressions to what happened inside a store means resolving exposure to verified people first and then matching those people to transactions.
That's what OptiGraph℠ and our offline attribution layer were built for, working from location and card-based signals rather than modeled estimates, so what reaches the co-op is a match-back somebody can audit rather than a projection somebody has to trust. There's a real constraint attached: market-level reads need volume, and somewhere around 10 million tagged impressions is where the signal gets solid enough to put in front of an operator who helped fund it.
Franchisees aren't going to stop asking, and the answer isn't going to come out of the reporting that exists today. Somebody inside the brand has to decide the question deserves a real answer and then go build one, which is a smaller project than it sounds like and a much smaller one than losing the room.