Only 36% of Danes say they perceive McDonald's as a good employer. The reason might very well be found in biased attitudes and preconceptions. Indeed, many of the employees still hear the same highly sceptical question: "Why do you work at McDonald's?".

Therefore, our main communications objectives were:

1. Build trust among Danes by communicating that working at McDonald's isn't just about flipping burgers.

2. Make Danes - especially young people 16-24 and their parents - discover

and be positively surprised that McDonald's invests massively in the development of young people by giving them a wide range of skills and helps develop their human qualities.

We transformed the employees' own stories into their own series.

“Everything changes” is a 6-episode webseries about Freja and Jonathan who showed Danes all the dreams, ambitions, and worries you have when getting your first job - in a period of life where everything changes. Freja is outgoing and leads a busy life. She is basically the representation of the prejudices that Danes have, but who slowly starts appreciating the jobs worth. Jonathan is the manager who at first glance might be a bit of a bore, but starts doubting whether he is in the right place because maybe he’s more outgoing than he thinks he is.

Instead of telling the target audience what working at McDonald’s gives you, we let them get it as entertainment. Hear Jonathan defend his job against his sisters prejudice. See how teamwork saves the day. See how confidence is built. And so much more.

To find true stories to build the campaign around we interviewed current and former employees, the CEO, HR, franchisees and restaurant managers. We even went into store training to experience the work alongside the employees we had to talk about.

We found out that for many of McDonald's employees, it's often their first encounter with working life. But life isn’t isolated to the work. As one manager said, "Running McDonald's is like running a restaurant, a dating service, and a youth counseling service, all at once".

In total we found 6 themes to focus on: self-confidence, responsibility, structure, development, cooperation, and education.

As young people don’t watch tv, we decided on a social campaign made with influencers at the core, where we could create an asset for each theme. Then we looked at the optimal channel where to show it (YouTube) and drive traffic from (Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, Spotify).

We collaborated with people from the audience we were trying to reach. Both the lead Anna Munch and musician Salomon Stampe gave the series credibility in the target group. Young director Anna Sørrig and scriptwriter (and influencer) Lasse Dein turned our idea into a story that felt authentic. Not written for our audience, but by them.

The series was launched on McDonald’s YouTube channel. It was promoted less like ads and more like a fictional series. Through paid social media different trailers and snippets hooked people and directed them to the series.

Both Anna and Salomon created influencer content for socials, sharing behind-the-scenes moments.

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The title track was released on Spotify, where Salomon voiced audio spots, and on TikTok, we pushed the song as a dance post for fans to join in.

Everything Changes as a campaign ran for 3 weeks, but still lives on YouTube organically.

The miniseries had 1,195,186 views in the first three weeks - more than 41,724 hours.

Around 80% of Danes aged 18-24 years watched the series.

Average view was 2.31 minutes per episode - a VTR of over 70% (benchmark 45%).

The campaign had 1500% higher CTR than McDonald's average.

Influencer content performed 10 times better than other McDonald's campaigns.

Brand KPIs:

39% says that "McDonald's is a good employer" – an increase of 8%.

"I've had a more positive view of McDonald's as a workplace lately" went up 42%.

52.5% said "McDonald's is a responsible workplace that educates young people and equips them for the future" – an increase of 11%.

In a qualitative post-test with the target audience the group said they identified with the characters, they felt it was involving and didn’t feel like an ad, and increased likelihood of taking a job at McDonald’s.