McDonald’s has shifted its campaign strategy into more “digital” style marketing. It seems that McDonald’s want to replace the myths about its business with the transparency.
Two McDonald’s latest promotional campaigns, Track My Macca’s and Our Food Your Questions, are the best examples.
Speaking at Ad:Tech Australia in Sydney on 18 March, McDonald’s Head of Digital Marketing, Media and Sponsorship, Mark Wheeler, said that there are a lot of myths out there that they want to revoke. They want to give customers the facts about their business and food facts through digital. There is an opportunity through digital to take the conversation to customers.
McDonald’s took its lesson from the Track My Macca’s app, their first digitally led marketing effort, and took the decision to make Our Food Your Questions more social to grow its impact. Here is the Track My Macca’s promotional video:
Dan Lipman, group account director at DDB who led the Track my Macca’s project added that one of the biggest things McDonald’s learned from the project was “personalisaton”, that was a restriction when it came to social shareability. It went on to build social into the heart of the next big digital project to create what it calls a “socially sourced real time FAQs” platform.
Another learning curve that came from Track My Macca’s was the importance of the content being able to live outside of an app to achieve scale. Track My Macca’s was restricted to an iPhone app, while Our Food Your Questions is multiplatform existing as a desktop website as well as mobile enabled platform with videos on YouTube, ads on TV and supporting above the line media, Lipman told delegates. McDonald’s also learned that not all emerging digital tools and technologies will turn out to be the next big thing. Augmented reality, which was a big part of the Track My Macca’s activity “is not as mainstream as they would have hoped”.
Being transparent, or trying to be, leaves brands open to others hijacking the platform with their own agenda. “However, to make it work, you have to take the rough with the smooth”, said Wheeler. “We’re a big brand, and not everyone is an advocate and people will always use a platform like this for their own agenda, but we have to take those negative comments as a positive and learn from them. We’re not going to be loved by everybody but as long as we do the right thing by consumers, that’s fine.”