Sharing a meal with loved ones is a quintessential feel-good holiday experience. Gift giving, another holiday tradition, can be a source of stress; we combined these insights to inspire a solution.

McDonald's owns one of the most shareable foods of all time: fries. It's easy to reach over and steal a fry from your girlfriend, your buddy, or your dad - and research shows that humans trust one another more after sharing a meal together.

This holiday, we made it easy to connect with friends and family by making our iconic shareable even more shareable.

While the concept of giving a gift during the holidays has been around for centuries, we wanted to reinvent that simple gesture in an innovative way that made it more personal than ever before. Sending a fry is more than just sending a gift; sending a fry is sharing a moment.

The week before Christmas, in a local McDonald's, we surprised customers in real life with mail-able fry cards and captured their stories of who they wanted to send fries to on film, turning them into a beautiful piece of heart-warming social content that fans could share across their channels.

That same week, we released a short film across McDonald's social channels, highlighting a long-distance friendship between friends and showing the power of sharing fries with someone you miss.

In the post copy for the film, on our Instagram and Twitter posts, we invited viewers to tag loved ones who they would share fries with. Hundreds responded, and to each fan who tagged someone, we sent a package containing one fry card they could mail to a friend which could be filled at any location for a medium fry. Additionally, we sent the mailers to influencers to share with their followers.

Overall, we distributed over 1,000 of the unique, beautifully crafted mailers, which were then sent across the United States by excited fans.

The results were staggering. For a brand where customers often take to social media to complain about negative experiences they have had in a restaurant, the overall sentiment of comments on McDonald's posts trends predominantly negative. But for the Fries We Share content, we saw the most engaged, relevant comments that the brand had seen all year, a 500% lift in positive comments on the posts.