Approximately 15% of all littering is take away packaging. As Sweden's largest fast food chain McDonald’s has a responsibility in finding a solution to the problem.

The brief was to create a brand activation centered around McDonald's collaboration with the Keep Sweden Tidy Foundation, a non-profit organization that promotes recycling and works to reduce littering. McDonald’s wanted to take the market leader role in the fight against littering, in accordance with the local long-term concept "Big enough to make a difference" and brand role "making good easy".

The objectives were to activate people in the McDonald's app and keep as much litter off the streets as possible.

Deal With The Trash. An AI tool in the McDonald’s app, trained to recognize specific fast food litter from McDonald’s. Awarding those who throw their take away litter in the bin with a deal at McDonald’s, simply by scanning it in the app and proving their good deed. But littering is not just a McDonald’s problem. So we trained the AI tool to recognize trash from McDonald’s biggest fast food competitors in Sweden as well - turning their trash into reasons to visit McDonald’s.

The target audience was everyone that visits the biggest fast food chains in Sweden every once in a while – meaning most of the Swedish population of 11+ million. The local brand role for McDonald's is "Making good easy" and over the last six years the communication concept has been "Big enough to make a difference" – using the scale of McDonald's to make a positive impact on society. The objective of the campaign was to address the problem with take away-litter in a way that made it easy for people to actively make the right choice and simultaneously tie them closer to McDonald’s.

The AI tool in the McDonald’s app was developed over more than 6 months, Initially, users uploaded images of their disposal actions via the McDonald's app in order to train an image recognition model. We then introduced a live image recognition feature to verify disposal, and trained the tool to include packaging from competitors. The feature employed advanced technologies including object detection, instance segmentation, and image classification, along with user-friendly annotation tools.

Deal With The Trash was launched early March 2024 with a nationwide 360 campaign that included outdoor, digital billboards, tvcs, cinema, OLV, print, SoMe content and in-restaurant communication. In the campaign – McDonald's Sweden's by far biggest over the last 12 months – we played with the fact that we were not allowed to use our competitors brand names. The campaign and the initiative is ongoing.

Deal With The Trash is changing consumer behavior, has made tonnes of trash end up where it belongs and motivated our competitor's guests to download our app and pay a visit to McDonald’s.

Media reach: 88% of Sweden's population.

App downloads: +13%

(vs same period last year)

Active app users: +23%

(vs same period last year)

Over 200 000 deals claimed.

2,7 tons of trash thrown in the bin and kept off Sweden's streets (so far).