This is the story of how an aging brand found lightning in a bottle when the world was at a standstill and this generation’s youth were yearning to experience something, anything.

McDonald’s needed a cultural reappraisal – the growth in the QSR (Quick Service Restaurants) category had come from young multicultural audiences, but McDonald’s kept losing share with this audience. The future, but also the present, of the brand was at stake.

The client brief was: “build the brand and drive traffic with multicultural youth”.

Commercial Objective:

Reverse sales decline and see share growth in a short period of time.

Marketing Objective:

Drive penetration by bringing younger, multicultural, customers to the brand.

Communication Objective:

We needed to drive relevance among this audience crucial to the future health of the brand.

But brand relevance and changing attitudes wouldn’t be enough, we had to find a way to drive immediate behavior too.

We began with our “Famous Orders” Super Bowl spot, inspired by a simple insight:

"No matter how big or famous you are, everyone has a McDonald's order."

It’s the kind of insight that can help a category leader set themselves apart, because everyone actually has a McDonald’s order. The way youth engaged with this idea on social demonstrated its potential.

From there, it’s not a huge leap to go from celebrity orders in a commercial to our breakthrough idea:

Release a celebrity’s order as a meal, and turn going to McDonald’s into a cultural event

But it was transformational for the brand, using Travis Scott and J Balvin to turn going to any of 14,000 McDonald’s into a cultural event.

During the Holidays, we used the same insight to wrap a slew of Holiday offers in something more meaningful and paired with a set of offers to emphasize affordability.

Multicultural youth hate ads. And while they live online, they don’t think in terms of “platforms.” To shock reappraisal in an audience that had discarded Mcdonald’s, we needed to prioritize people over platforms and show up in a way that was inherently social.

We set down some criteria for approaching talent:

- A legit fan of McDonald’s. This audience grew up surrounded by brand partnerships and could suss out inauthenticity.

- Big enough name to create heat.

- Relevant to our audience.

And some simple ingredients for the ‘Famous Orders’ program itself:

- Signature meal announced in a PR-worthy way.

- Content to fuel the fanbase and drive participation - and ultimately sales.

- Shared equity > borrowed equity.

- An affordable experience everyone could get in on, especially younger customers with smaller wallets.

Famous Orders began as our 2020 Super Bowl commercial and featured celebrity orders from the likes of Kim K, Kanye, Patrick Mahomes, Magic Johnson and more. The way youth engaged with this ad on social - especially how Kim K dips her nuggets in honey - proved that we’re all in the same McDonald’s together.

In September 2020, with Travis Scott, Famous Orders graduated from celebrating celebrity orders, to taking an order and making it available for purchase across all 14,000 restaurants. A merging of worlds, we were able to leverage both Travis’s and then in October, J. Balvin’s distinct sound and iconography, creating keepsakes for fans to serve as totems of these iconic partnerships.

The Holidays saw Famous Orders change yet again by pairing the seasons most iconic, fictional, characters with food deals that were only available in the McDonald’s app. Merging an emotional Holiday spot with tactical offers.

Lots of brands talk about ‘breaking the Internet’ (which we did) and ‘creating culture’ – but we drove more than 2000 media placements, 306 Million Earned Reach and 97% favorable tone…Even our POS posters were stolen and resold on sites like eBay. And very few brands can say they broke their own supply chain. Wall St analysts immediately recognized the power of these partnerships and upgraded stock price estimates.

We exceeded all our objectives. Customers were overwhelmingly young and multicultural. We drove penetration with all 3 multicultural segments and grew 18-24 segment by 3.5%. Sales grew by 10%. That’s 12 million incremental orders and $50 million in incremental revenue. We accrued more than 1.4 million app downloads. We even increased market share at lunch by 1.3%. And did it all profitably: for every $1 spent on marketing, ROMI was $3.22.