Digital Media Is Getting More Expensive. Here's How Franchise Marketers Are Staying Ahead of It.

Performance marketing costs are rising. Attribution is eroding. The metrics we've leaned on for years are getting harder to trust. And the default response — spend more on paid social, pile more into search — is doing exactly what you'd expect a default response to do. Not much.

I had this conversation recently with three people who are neck-deep in it: Christy Johnson, CMO of Tint World; Madison Belfour, Tint World's Director of Marketing; and Alex Preddie, VP of Sales and Marketing at Rocket Barn. What came out of it wasn't a listicle of solutions. It was something more useful: a clearer way to frame the problem.

The question isn't whether performance dropped. It's whether you're asking the right question.

Alex Preddie put this plainly early in the conversation: "Has your conversion rate really changed? Your sale really changed, or has it just gotten more expensive?" The instinct when costs go up and leads slow down is to declare the campaign broken. But sometimes the campaign isn't broken. The economics have just shifted. Distinguishing between those two things — degraded performance versus inflated costs — changes what you do next entirely.

Christy reinforced this from the brand side. The problem, she said, is that "we were trained for so long to look at metrics, so everybody's looking at quantity over quality." If your CPL looks worse but your lead quality has improved, you may actually be winning. Madison put it with the sharpest line of the conversation: a franchisee once told her he wished he had "2022 traffic at 2026 quality." That's not the world we live in. But it does name exactly what every franchise marketer is chasing.

First-party data isn't a buzzword anymore. It's a survival strategy.

The brands that are leading the pack right now, according to Alex, are "focusing heavy on first-party data, ensuring that they have their own ways of capturing that now." With third-party attribution getting murkier and AI changing how consumers find information before they ever hit your website, what you own matters more than what you rent.

This connects directly to something Alex flagged about AI readiness: "People don't need to come to your website to find the information, but has your lead generation actually dropped?" Organic search traffic declining is not the same as demand declining. If a consumer asks an AI assistant about your brand and gets a confident, accurate answer, that's a win — whether or not it shows up in your analytics. The problem is most brands aren't writing the content that makes that possible.

Franchisees are your biggest content asset. And your biggest content bottleneck.

One of the most honest tensions in this conversation: franchising has a structural advantage in local content creation — a real person in every market with real community relationships — and almost universally struggles to activate it.

Christy's advice is to stop waiting for franchisees to figure it out on their own: "Make the franchisees' life easier through templates, through tools, through things that help expedite and keep brand consistency. That's how you keep governance on the DNA of the brand." AI can help here, but she's clear-eyed about its limits. Use it to create efficiencies. Don't use it as a replacement for authentic content.

Madison's test for franchisees who are heavy into AI-generated social content: ask them whether it's getting engagement. "When they're kind of like, no, not really — they answer their own question that it's not really working." That's not an argument against AI. It's an argument for knowing what you're using it to do.

Alex goes further. He suggests having franchisees literally look themselves up in an AI assistant and see what comes back. "Are you guys able to solve this particular problem? And they're like, well of course we can. I'm like, well, let's ask AI and see what they say." The content gap shows up immediately. And once franchisees see it, the conversation about why consistent local content matters gets a lot easier to have.

Customer journey mapping beats channel allocation. Every time.

The most useful strategic reframe of this conversation came from Christy: stop allocating budget by channel percentage and start allocating it by customer moments. "We're not defining by channel anymore and we're not allocating our budget by channel anymore. We're allocating it by customer moments."

That's a different planning document. Instead of 30% digital, 20% social, it becomes: at this point in the journey, the customer is doing this, so we're meeting them here, here, and here. Madison's pizza analogy captures the budget reality underneath it: "I used to work in a pizza parlor when I was in high school and I always use the analogy that if you want more slices from the existing pie, the slices are just gonna be smaller." More channels, same budget, diminishing returns. That's the trap.

And the thing franchise marketers keep falling into, according to Alex, is Google PPC that's been "implemented with too much of a one size fits all structure" — rolled out across a brand because five locations were doing great, without accounting for local relevance. "If you actually look at how much money goes into that versus how much you lose from it being run inefficiently, that's probably where the most money is actually bled out."

The question heading into 2027

If you are building your media plan for 2027 by looking at what you spent in 2026 and deciding where to add or subtract, you are working from the wrong starting point. The more useful question — the one this conversation kept circling back to — is: what does your customer actually do between the first time they become aware of you and the moment they transact? And is your current media mix showing up at each of those moments, or just the last one?

This post was inspired by a conversation with Alex Preddie, VP of Sales and Marketing, Rocket Barn and Christy Johnson and Madison Belfour, CMO and Director of Marketing, Tint World, recorded for the Franchise Marketing Spotlight in August 2026.

Listen to the full conversation at https://youtu.be/kvttFLN64ww