Dave & Buster's brought on Gut and Mediaplus this week to fix a relevance problem, hoping better national campaigns can connect to what happens in local stores. It is a real strategy and a lot of money. But it assumes the gap between a brand and its guests gets closed in a boardroom. For most operators, it gets closed or blown open on the floor, tonight, one table at a time.
Here is the thing D&B's agencies cannot fix from the outside: every server, host, and bartender is already running a marketing campaign, whether you're managing it or not. A guest who gets a warm greeting, a food recommendation that actually lands, and a check-back that references their exact dish walks out and tells three friends. A guest who gets ignored, or treated like a stranger on their second visit, tells more people the opposite story, and no agency retainer buys that back.
So before you think about a media budget, look at what your floor is actually advertising right now. Pull your last week of tickets and ask one question: which of these guests have we seen before, and did anyone at the table know it? If a regular got treated like a walk-in, that's a relevance problem you're creating in-house, for free, every single shift.
The fix is not a campaign, it's a habit. Train hosts and servers to flag first-time guests the moment they're seated, out loud, so the whole table's team can convert them intentionally instead of by accident. Train the opposite instinct for anyone who's been in before: a name, a reference to their usual order, a genuine "good to see you again" before they have to remind you who they are. That single behavior, done consistently, is worth more to your relevance than most local ad buys.
Then measure it like the ROI it actually is. Most operators can tell you their average check. Few can tell you what a guest's third visit is worth compared to their first, or how many first-timers actually came back last month. That number is your real brand relevance metric, and it is sitting in your POS data right now, unused.
This week's move, if you want to newsjack Dave & Buster's own homework: pick one shift and have every server ask each table whether they've been in before, and log it. See how many "yes" answers get a genuine acknowledgment versus a blank stare. That gap is your agency brief, and you don't need to hire anyone to close it.
Brand relevance for a chain with hundreds of locations is a national problem that needs national tools. Brand relevance for a single restaurant is a floor problem, solved by whether the team recognizes a returning guest, sells the menu with real knowledge, and recovers a bad night before the guest tells ten people about it. That's the campaign that's always running, whether anyone is watching it or not.
Wingman exists for that exact gap, giving managers a simple way to see whether the floor is actually flagging first-timers, working the repeat-visit habit, and turning today's guest into next week's regular, without waiting on a quarterly ad report to find out it isn't happening.