For years, McDonald’s had been losing relevance and share with multicultural youth, the future driver of QSR success. To ensure the future success of the business, we needed to start drawing youth back into the restaurant immediately while building long term brand love to ensure their visits continued in the future.

McDonald’s had made progress with efforts like Famous Orders and the Cactus Plant Flea Market Box, but the battle for this audience requires constant vigilance and investment. We needed something surprising and magnetic to engage youth and continue leading the category creatively. Ideally, something no other brand could copy.

Our core challenge was to become a part of youth culture for the long-term and to drive the business (via penetration and sales) in the short-term: we needed an idea that connected with this new generation in a way that would catapult both the McDonald’s brand and business forward.

How do we get more Gen Z fans into the restaurant? Not by creating a $3M ad campaign, but by creating a purple “Grimace” shake.

We’d noticed that anytime we mentioned or featured our beloved McDonald’s character Grimace on our social channels, the comments section went wild. Even when we don’t mention Grimace, fans bring him up.

So we decided to throw a birthday party for him, creating a brand new purple birthday shake to get youth in the doors of the restaurant—which is just the kind of weird, internetty, “we’re all in on the joke” idea our fans love and the press loves to write about.

And, by designing elements that invited fans to make it their own, we ultimately created a blowout celebration that captured America’s attention for much longer than the month-long campaign— through the entire end of the year.

For this to be a real party, we needed to bring Grimace out of McDonaldland and into the real world. From media outreach to social content, every aspect of this celebration was hosted by Grimace-including the introduction of his very own new shake as vibrantly colored as his fur, with a mystery flavor just as ambiguous as his shape.

Our strategy was to tap into the ambiguity and cultural phenomenon of Grimace to drive buzz and deeper storytelling with media and influencers, and ultimately drive Gen Z fans into restaurants.

We did this by:

-Giving select social media editors early and exclusive access to Grimace, our McD’s birthday archives, and the Meal + Shake to curate content

-Elevating all the different ways we were celebrating Grimace’s birthday in June via unique angles media in publications Gen Z reads

-Leaning into current Gen Z digital trends and creative earned/paid influencer tactics

For the game to go live during the campaign window, we only had 12 weeks to pull it off. This meant that the agency team and Krool Toys needed to be in lockstep with concepting the storyline, designing the visual approach, as well as character design and gameplay.

Our intentions in creating this game were to tap into a subculture and gain credibility with the gaming audience, but providing an entertaining experience for our fans. People could join the party by purchasing the Grimace shake, and the mobile aspect of the game meant the party could continue on their phones or desktop.

When you visit the game’s URL, you’re greeted with a throwback landing page that calls back to early internet days. As Grimace, you skateboard, jump, and dodge through each level as an 8bit soundtrack cheers you on, culminating in a minigame where you blow out the birthday candles.

An Insider headline summed up the impact: “McDonald’s brought back its iconic mascot Grimace for an unhinged marketing scheme that has taken the Internet by storm.”

More than 6,200 headlines in publications like Hypebeast, USA Today, Forbes, Delish, Glamour, Today, and The Tonight Show smashed our media goals across top-tier verticals.

PR sparked an organic TikTok trend that went viral, beating the campaign’s social volume goal 100 times over and becoming the most successful McDonald’s social campaign ever.

With 875k more Gen Z visits to McDs, Nation’s Restaurant News said, “McDonald’s won over Gen Z by bringing back Grimace." Ad Age named Grimace’s Shake the “Best Product Launch of 2023" and one of the best ideas of the year.

Grimace was one of Google’s top search terms of 2023 and made several major publications’ end-of-year “Top Trends of 2023” lists, including The New York Times, Complex, and The Today Show.

Other noteworthy results:

-Online interest in “birthdays at McDonald’s” grew more than 900%

-The limited-time meal and purple shake sold out nationwide, creating a frenzy amongst our Gen Z fans.

-Youth fans crafted +160k Grimace TikToks, buying shakes every time

-Fans recorded 100+ original Grimace songs. Complex and Loudwire remade famous album covers from Metallica to Kendrick Lamar to feature Grimace.

We grew youth penetration, the future of the business, and incremental sales at a time when the category lost ground with youth. When you’re able to inspire an ad-resistant audience to run with your idea, you’ve won.