How Surface Agency Achieved 6x Media Efficiency For Red Robin With PersonaLive

Challenge

Red Robin needed a smarter way to segment and target customers across hundreds of locations, but lacked a data source capable of characterizing their best customers at the individual store level. Their national campaigns were broad and undifferentiated — and without the ability to immediately identify and reach look-alike prospects, significant media spend was going to waste.

Approach

Surface Agency partnered with Spatial.ai to cluster Red Robin's store locations by their dominant PersonaLive customer segments. For each cluster, they built tailored marketing menus and pricing aligned to that location's unique customer profile. They then launched national personalized campaigns across Google, Facebook, and programmatic channels, each driven by PersonaLive micro-segments at the location level.

Result

The segmented, location-level approach delivered 6x media efficiencies at scale. While competitors were outspending Surface Agency 6-to-1 for the same traffic, the PersonaLive-powered campaigns held their ground — and then some. Shortly after the campaign, Red Robin released its 2025 annual results: following Q4, the company's stock price surged 38%.

Conclusion

PersonaLive gave Surface Agency the ability to move beyond national averages and speak to each Red Robin location's real customer — not a composite persona. The platform's micro-segment data turned a single brand's national campaign into hundreds of targeted, locally relevant conversations, proving that smarter segmentation can out-compete even the biggest media budgets.