DDB and McDonald's have a long relationship and from 2012 to 2017 we worked on many different long and short term initiatives - from tactical marketing to digital strategy.
As we did everything from the tray liners and in-store promotion materials to brand development and innovation project, we worked almost like an agency within the agency to fully integrate design, digital, campaign creative and content - in close collaboration with the stakeholders at McDonald's and other partners such as the media agency, pr agency, McDonald's IT in Chicago and ApeGroup - the agency behind the McDonald's app.
Challenges & strategic objective: The long term goal in digital was to gradually digitize the business and market communications. As moving into a fully digital business model for such a huge company is not done overnight, the strategy focused on building a large and sustainable digital footprint, laying the groundwork for the bigger shift ahead of time.
Key to this is the McDonald's app and building a user base around loyalty, entertaining activations, promotions and in-store integration, while integrating social media in everything. A 3rd objective in most efforts is also to drive immediate sales without hampering the brand: McDonald's measures everything and is highly data driven in their approach while still setting part of the budget aside for experimentation.
Weaving all of these components into working ecosystems that take advantage of physical and multiple digital touchpoints to engage, build an active and engaged user base and ultimately improve the customer experience was a fun challenge that really saw massive impact - even as the long anticipated shift into mobile ordering is still not reality in Sweden.
Role: My role in the the many different initiatives varied but overall was to promote innovation, make sure our concepts and ideas were as sharp as possible and that digital, physical, advertising, pr and design all played together towards both tactical and strategic goals.
BeatQuiz - a unique way to engage with music at the restaurant
As McDonald's got heavier competition from "gourmet fast food" and craft burgers, focus had to shift to improving the restaurant experience, and a fast way to do that is music.
Growing social with engaging content
The digital team worked closely and continuously with the McDonald's SoMe and marketing people from 2010 onwards – growing the McDonalds Facebook page to become the second most followed brand in Sweden by 2012. All initiatives we took on had a clear target to increase engagement and followers.
While the Facebook page became a catch-all channel for engaging fans, to launch McDonald's Sweden on Instagram, we created a content strategy to optimize engagement through content and creativity – reducing the amount of overt marketing and product promotions. Key to this work was to create a series of mini-concepts that could be varied over time and to avoid run of the mill cliches. The "Hack Donald's" concept is one such concept where we had an ongoing conversation with followers on how to creatively hack the menu and make new dishes from McDonald's products.
As with everything McDonalds there is plenty of numbers and data to measure impact, and we saw McDonald's on instagram grow at more than 3x the rate of Facebook almost immediately.
Fruit Match - Integrating all touchpoints in product promotions
One of many digital media innovations we worked with - in this case to launch Iced Smoothies in Sweden. Fruit Match was an activation that mixed mobile with out of home and TV advertising in a brand new way, creating the world’s first gamification of TV ads.
Go&Get - a location driven marketing platform with a twist.
When bringing McWraps to the Swedish market in 2012, the main objective was to make people try it as research showed that once people tried it whey kept buying it. At the same time we wanted to use the occasion to onboard more users to the McDonald's app.
The solution became Go & Get - a platform for location based scavenger hunts with a twist that directly fits with the main marketing message: McWraps is too tasty to put down. So we integrated a function into the McDonald's app that would allow you to use the app to find a virtual McWrap at your location and convert it into a freebie coupon - but to do so you had to walk all the way to a restaurant while keeping your thumb on the screen, or you would lose your prize. Driving engagement, footfall and increased spend, the concept proved so successful it was implemented on multiple markets and we also re-purposed it for other products: Find a virtual cup of coffee, and balance it all the way to McDonald's without spilling it. And find an ice cream, and hurry into the restaurant before it melts. Etc.
Counting down to what matters to you.
Social apps on Facebook was an emerging theme in 2012-2014 and McDonald's wanted to weave social creativity as a means of connecting the dots between social media and the mobile app platform. One example is this Facebook Brand App that let users create personal timers counting down to things they look forward to - movie premieres, concerts, travel, birthdays, you name it - and have their countdowns shared, displayed and shown on anything from their desktop to advertising billboards.
Evolving with the mobile app
3 different activations in the McDonald's app - MyBurger (2013), McTimers (2014) and FruitMatch (2015) showing how the app evolved.
The mobile app is key to McDonald's strategy and has been used as a living platform for integrating all sorts of promotions, social engagement combined with loyalty, offers and entertainment to grow the audience in anticipation of ultimately going to full digital business with ordering and payments. As the app evolved courtesy of ApeGroup, being able to integrate all sorts of concepts deeply and seamlessly into the app was key to creating very sophisticated concepts and seamless user experience at a high pace while building long term value.
