A radius is convenient. It isn't a customer strategy.
Drawing a circle around a restaurant is an easy way to describe an advertising audience. Christopher Sebes asks a more useful question: what if the customers you want are concentrated somewhere else? The restaurant's address and the best place to reach its audience do not have to be the same point on the map.
In his ChatGTM conversation with Michael Beck and Chad Horn, Sebes discusses using geographic information and business data to make local advertising more deliberate. His move from restaurant technology into advertising also gives him a familiar target: repetitive work that people perform because their systems do not cooperate.
The two problems are connected. A more thoughtful targeting plan has limited value if launching it across locations takes so long that the occasion has passed. Better decisions need an operating process that can carry them into the market while they are still relevant.
Look at where demand is already coming from
Sebes describes using delivery and catering information to understand geographic concentrations of customers. Instead of assuming demand spreads evenly around a store, the business can look for areas where it already has evidence of a relationship.
That evidence should lead to a test, not an automatic conclusion. An area producing orders may contain additional relevant customers, but past concentration alone does not prove that more advertising will be profitable. The offer, occasion, competition and ability to serve the area still matter.
For an operator, the useful starting point is a question the data can actually answer. Where do recent catering deliveries go? Which locations serve those orders? Are there recurring business districts or other identifiable patterns? Work with appropriate permissions and aggregated insight rather than assuming that more personal detail always makes a campaign better.
Count the work between the idea and the launch
A campaign for multiple locations and multiple advertising platforms can become a large collection of repetitive setup tasks. Sebes describes the problem in terms of the number of campaigns a person can create and the time lost while expanding the same idea across a network.
His argument for automation is partly about preserving the usefulness of human work. The team should be able to spend time on the audience, message and interpretation of results instead of repeatedly entering equivalent information into separate systems.
That gives a business a concrete way to evaluate its process. Time a recent launch from approved creative to live placement. Separate actual strategic decisions from data entry, approvals and corrections. Then identify which repetitions could be removed without weakening the checks that protect the brand or the budget.
Equal allocation is a choice, not a neutral default
Sebes challenges the assumption that every location or channel should receive an equal share of advertising spend. In the conversation, he describes reallocating toward places and platforms showing stronger results, rather than preserving an initial split simply because it is tidy.
That approach requires a clear definition of results. Impressions, clicks, inquiries and purchases answer different questions. A lower cost for one metric does not automatically establish better business performance. A team needs to know what it is optimizing and whether the measurement supports the decision being made.
The same caution applies to underperforming stores. They may need marketing support, but advertising cannot diagnose every operational or local-market problem. Decide whether a campaign is intended to test demand, acquire customers or support a specific recovery effort, then review it against that purpose.
Keep creative authority clear while execution becomes easier
Sebes distinguishes campaign execution from creating the brand's message. He describes customers supplying creative and a franchisor being able to limit selections to an approved library. That division gives local execution a defined space in which to operate.
It is a useful design principle for a growing business. Removing repetitive setup does not require removing judgment about what the company says. A system can make deployment faster while retaining clear ownership of the message, the assets and the circumstances in which they should be used.
Start with one campaign where geography and timing genuinely matter. Write down the audience hypothesis, the approved message and the outcome you intend to measure. Review both the marketing result and the effort required to launch it. The goal is a team that can learn and respond more effectively, with a map that reflects actual customers rather than the convenience of drawing a circle.
