How Brill Media built a restaurant business that has no restaurants

Restaurant: Multi-Market Virtual Kitchens

Six Launches, One Playbook

Overview

Creating demand without physical storefronts

A celebrity owned healthy restaurant concept group operated three core menus: bowls and salads, rotisserie, and pizza. All were run out of third party ghost kitchens across Los Angeles. No dining rooms. No signage. No one walking past. Just online real estate.

Advertising generated the orders from kitchens within a five-mile radius. Each new location started from zero for customer visibility.

Brill Media ran the media for six market launches and the evergreen business behind them. A direct to order channel ran on the back of efficient media buying and grew to millions in tracked revenue.

Responsibilities: Media Strategy, Media Management, Multi-Market Launch, Creative Testing, Measurement Infrastructure

Challenges

A delivery brand that lost its customers to the delivery apps

No Storefront, No Discovery: There were zero opportunities for consumers to stumble upon the business. Since they had no locations there was no walk-in traffic or neighborhood presence. Paid media reached customers within a few miles of each kitchen, and nothing else did.

Competing Against Their Own Distribution: Customers who searched the brand name were presented with multiple ways to buy from the brand. Sounds great in theory, but restaurant aggregators were winning the order and eating the margin. Or, the order could disappear entirely if the customer, once inside a delivery app, ends up simply ordering something else.

Margins That Left No Room for Waste: Efficiency was the whole business. $100,000 in sales may only yield $3,300 in profit after ad costs and partnership fees. That 3.3% profit held room for improvement.

Every Market Started From Zero: Each market opened without a foundation. It was a new targeting radius, different audience, and no existing customers. Six kitchens opened in sequence, and each one reset the problem.

A Crowded Category: Sixteen named direct competitors were bidding for the same intent in Los Angeles healthy delivery.

Solutions

Winning the brand term, then repeating the launch

Own the Search Result: Search became the engine of the account. Campaigns targeted branded search terms so buyers would land on our site, and not on delivery aggregators. Search CTR reached 39%, while social stayed under 1%. Branded keywords alone reached a 45.86% click-through rate.

A Repeatable Virtual Launch Playbook: Facebook lead generation campaigns started before each new store location launch to create a local customer database. Then we transitioned to evergreen conversion campaigns the day the kitchen went live. Overall, 3,914 leads at $3.84 each, and one market launch alone delivered exactly 1,000 leads at $3.11.

Systematic Creative Testing: A three step framework ran: broad creative testing, dynamic ad combination testing, scaling the proven winner. These strategies maintained cost per purchase between $2 and $10 over seven to eight months of continuous optimization.

Hyperlocal Precision: Every campaign targeted a five-mile radius from the kitchen's location.

Per-Market Budget Governance: Spend was tracked and rebalanced across campaigns and reviewed weekly against budget. Each location was independently audited, shifting dollars toward the best channels.

Key Results

Efficiency at scale, sustained for years

Profit Share Increased

Profit after ad spend increased 3.27 times during our campaigns, from 3.3% to 10.8%.

1,103% Return On Ad Spend

$287,532 in media returned $3,172,030 in tracked revenue.

53,349 Purchases

Customer acquisition cost was $5.39.

3,914 Pre-Launch Leads

To date, 3,914 pre-launch leads at $3.84 each have seeded six market openings.

Impact

A demand channel that the brand actually owns

The results held. Over the next fifteen months, the account generated an additional $2.9 million in revenue, at 1,213% and 1,311% return on ad spend. Efficiency improved.

More importantly, the brand stopped renting its customers, or losing them to aggregators.

Orders that would have gone through delivery marketplaces at a lower margin, or lost altogether, came directly to our client. The client owned the channel with the customer data that comes with it.

For a company operating on thin margins out of kitchens nobody can find, that difference is the difference.

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