McDonald’s sales have been declining globally. Australian millennials lacked affinity with McDonald’s and The Big Mac. We had to use earned and owned channels to ignite sentiment and get millennials talking about the Big Mac.

There’s one ingredient on the McDonald’s menu that everyone knows and loves. For the first time ever we decided to unlock Big Mac Special Sauce making it available to everyone.

We launched through media relations features, heroing the sauce (and the burger that made it famous) and revealed that just one bottle of the sauce would be available to the public via an eBay charity auction. This generated significant interest and in turn, huge demand for a limited supply of sauce.

Supporting this was an influencer outreach program that saw celebrities and bloggers each given one of just 200 bottles of sauce.

Within 24 hours, Australia – and the globe – were talking about Special Sauce. Importantly, these conversations were being led by outlets and influencers who engage a millennial audience. News of the eBay auction trended (twice on consecutive nights!) on Facebook.

The interest then provided opportunity to communicate with media and generated a second wave of global hype and discussion.

We then took the sauce to the streets releasing limited edition sauce tubs through tweet-powered vending machines. Allowing consumers who would otherwise not interact with the brand, get their hands on the Special Sauce.

The result? A highest bid of $23,600 for the eBay charity auction, 3.8 billion PR impressions, 6m social impressions and the strongest Big Mac sales in Australian history.

Our idea enabled access to something previously locked into the Big Mac - the Special Sauce. In a world first, McDonald’s Australia released the Special Sauce in a limited run of 200 bottles.

To dramatise the exclusivity of the Special Sauce release, we placed bottle no.1 on eBay and asked people to bid for it. The remaining 199 coveted bottles of Special Sauce were sent to select millennial influencers inviting them to share their own #macitbetter content.

To further inspire our audience, film seeded via social media showed consumers how to #macitbetter with the Big Mac Special Sauce.

McDonald’s then took to the streets over 3 weeks with Sauce Bombing Squads, and a tweet powered vending machine distributing a total of 35,000 free Special Sauce tubs near popular eateries in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane where people might want to #macitbetter.

- Best Big Mac sales ever in Australia (over any other 4 week period).

- 3.8 billion (!) PR impressions

- A highest bid of $23,600 for the eBay charity auction

- Additional +6 million social impressions (double the target of 3m)

- +4.5 million more people into McDonalds than the same time last year

- Doubled positive social sentiment (week prior to launch 8% increased to 17% in first week of campaign)

- Improved “Brand I love” and “Brand for me” measures.