Why Restaurants Should Anchor Their Next Big Move to a Revenue Moment

The FIFA World Cup kicks off June 11, and the action won’t be limited to just the soccer pitch. 27% of fans plan to watch at a restaurant, while nearly half plan to watch from home—a massive opportunity for dine-in, but more so for takeout and catering. A recent Deutsche Bank analysis identified a handful of brands as best positioned because of their proximity to host cities, including Sweetgreen (49% of units), Shake Shack* (34%), and The Cheesecake Factory (29%), among others. It also called out high-delivery-mix concepts (Domino's, Wingstop, Pizza Hut, Papa Johns), catering-forward brands like Chipotle, and globally recognized concepts running World Cup activations (McDonald's, Starbucks, Shake Shack*) as early winners.

FIFA President Gianni Infantino says the tournament will be like “104 Super Bowls in one month.” If your brand isn’t listed above, how can you make the most of this supernova sports event?

Whether it’s the Big Game, NBA Finals, or World Series, the brands that consistently win them aren't simply spending more on marketing. They've figured out that a significant cultural moment is the highest-ROI date for scaling or stress-testing the parts of their business they want to grow, and that this requires marketing, operations, and digital readiness to move in the same direction at the same time.

Here's what I've learned watching brands convert these moments into compounding growth, and what every operator should be putting in motion immediately.

1. Revenue moments are operational events, not marketing campaigns

The instinct when a major moment is on the horizon is to hand it to marketing and call it done. Not so fast. A revenue moment occurs when a brand uses a high-intent demand spike to acquire new guests, convert them into known guests, and drive repeat behavior afterward. A concerted effort amongst the marketing engine, digital ordering stack, loyalty program, catering channel, and operations team is what actually converts intent into revenue. In other words, it takes the whole team working as one unit.

The Deutsche Bank analysis underscored this reality: World Cup winners will be brands that combine targeted marketing with operational positioning, including in-restaurant TVs playing matches, delivery readiness, and group ordering. A clever, creative campaign without the digital plumbing isn’t enough. A solid foundation is needed to support the weight of these major revenue moments.

2. Build the ramp before the spike

The pattern I see across our most successful customers is this: when they're rolling out a new product, a new channel, or a new initiative, they don't pick an arbitrary Tuesday with no momentum, nor do they try to debut cold on the highest-traffic day of the year either. They time the launch ahead of a revenue moment, giving the rollout space to ramp so the moment becomes the payoff.

A revenue moment delivers built-in traffic, earned media, and guest urgency that would otherwise cost major marketing dollars to generate. Timing a launch to land in that environment compresses what would normally be a six-month adoption curve into a single high-volume window. New guests arrive because the moment brought them. They get a great first experience because the brand spent time refining the rollout. The brand walks out the other side with behavior data, a known-guest cohort, and operational learning that would have taken a full quarter to accumulate otherwise.

That's how restaurant brands should be thinking about the World Cup right now. If there's a new ordering channel, menu item, loyalty tier, or catering offering you've been preparing, the question is whether June 11 can be the moment it pays off. If your team is already mid-stride on a launch, the window to accelerate is open—and June 11 is the clearest deadline you'll have all year.

3. Marketing, operations, and digital readiness must work in symbiosis

A revenue moment is so powerful, it exposes every gap in your stack. Marketing drives traffic that operations can't absorb—and the guest experience suffers. Operations are ready, but the digital experience is clunky—guests bounce to a competitor whose app works. If both are sharp, but loyalty isn't capturing new guest data, you've paid acquisition cost and walked away with nothing repeatable.

The brands that win treat the three as a single system:

• Targeted, moment-driven marketing activations (campaigns, partnerships, local store marketing in host markets, social and PR) pull demand into the channel.
• Flexed operations through extended hours, staffing aligned to peak windows, kitchen throughput, delivery capacity (both owned and aggregator), local-store readiness for group orders, and watch-party volume.
• Direct ordering channels stress-tested for spikes, catering and group ordering flows surfaced prominently, loyalty program positioned as the front door so new guests become known guests, payment and fraud infrastructure ready for higher transaction volumes.

Restaurants balance this every day. The difference during the World Cup is concentration: hungry sports fans want to eat, some on-premise watching at the bar, some off-premise hosting a watch party at home, often within the same hour. The brands that have the systems pointed at that single guest, regardless of channel, will pull ahead.

4. Brands are still underutilizing catering

Of all the conversations I'm having with customers right now, this is the one I keep coming back to. Deutsche Bank's analysis explicitly calls out group-occasion offerings and catering as a differentiator, and watch parties (both in-home and in-restaurant) are the dominant consumption pattern for tournament viewing. And yet many of the brands best positioned by units, delivery mix, and brand recognition haven't launched catering yet or are still treating it as a side channel rather than a primary growth channel.

Catering is purpose-built for high-value, planned orders and AOV is often 10x higher than individual mealtime orders. The brands I see executing well here treat catering not as a separate product but as an extension of the same direct-relationship infrastructure they use for everything else: same data, same channel discipline. Same guest, larger basket, planned in advance.

The economics matter every day of the year, yet exponentially so during a 30-day window when the country is hosting the world.

5. Quick checks before kickoff

The brands that win revenue moments are already running these checks. Not just for the World Cup—for every high-traffic moment on the calendar.

• Audit your footprint for the moment. Which units are in the highest-opportunity markets? Are hours updated to reflect peak windows? Is delivery capacity—owned and aggregator—sized for a spike?
• Surface group ordering everywhere it should be. Are your catering channels live? Is it findable in your guest experience? For watch-party occasions, friction here is revenue lost.
• Turn on Order Ready AI. High-volume moments are exactly when throttling decisions get hard. Order Ready AI takes that off your team's plate—managing quote times and order pacing automatically so the kitchen doesn't fall behind when demand spikes.
• Activate timely marketing. A revenue moment is one of the highest-leverage times to put the right message in front of the right guest. Whether that's a watch-party promotion, a catering nudge, or a loyalty offer tied to the occasion, Engage is how that communication gets to guests at scale.
• Put loyalty to work. A revenue moment brings in guests who don't know you yet. Loyalty is how you make sure they come back—turning a one-time occasion into a mealtime habit. Make sure your program is visible, easy to join, and that new guest data is flowing into a single record you can market against after the moment passes.
• Stand up or scale catering. For Olo customers, if catering isn't live, the question is whether it can be before kickoff, and that's a question we can answer directly. If it is live, the question is whether your sales team, your guest-facing channels, and your local marketing all know that catering for watch parties is the play.
• Build the repeatable playbook. Every revenue moment you execute well teaches you something. Document what worked—the staffing calls, the digital activations, the channel mix—so the next moment starts from a higher baseline.

The through-line

Revenue moments concentrate demand—but they also concentrate every operational and digital decision a brand has made in the months leading up to them. The guest watching a match at the bar and the guest ordering for a watch party at home are increasingly the same guest, served by the same system. The brands that treat the next three weeks as a system rather than a marketing campaign will look very different on the other side of it—and the work pays dividends across every revenue moment that follows. If you're thinking through how to put your tech stack to work on the moments ahead, we'd love to be in the conversation.

*Indicates a brand that is an Olo customer