The challenge for McDonald’s was to create an unexpected and joyful experience for McDonald’s lovers to help drive purchase intent, brand engagement and reinforce good food attributes of taste and permissibility associated with McDonald’s. McDonald’s has hundreds of thousands of lovers, followers, and fans; however, McDonald’s social channels and content are not their top priority to look at/engage with.

Inspiring fan passion became the root of success. McDonald’s French Fries are the undisputed champion of the fast food world. But their deliciousness has also made them the #1 target of fry thieves around the world. To protect your fries, McDonald’s has developed the world’s first French Fry security system.

Using cutting edge motion detector technology and your smartphone’s camera, the Fry Defender alerts you the moment a fry theft is attempted and lets you file a report of the fry crime – or "frime" – to social media along with a photo of the thief.

The campaign featured a Tumblr page, online video, social content and user generated fry theft reports. Thanks to Fry Defender, there was a 288% lift in app downloads, over 1M video views and 80% of engagements in social were positive – not to mention the countless fries saved.

To protect your fries, McDonald’s developed the world’s first French Fry security system, Fry Defender. Using motion detector technology and your smartphone’s camera, the Fry Defender alerts you the moment a fry theft occurs using several alarm sounds and a flashing screen, all while capturing photos of the thief. After preventing the fry crime, or “frime”, the images can be reported to social channels directly from the app – shaming the fry thief and preventing future thefts.

The campaign featured an introductory online video, a Tumblr page that expanded the vast world of fry thievery, and social content in McDonald’s channels.

More importantly, an increase of 288% in downloads surpassed all expectation and each other medium met or exceeded KPI predictions with over one million video views on YouTube, 80% positive social engagements and 12,000,000 organic PR impressions from around the globe.