We were asked to mark the 40-year anniversary of McDonald’s in Germany. Occasions like this one are usually celebrated with a promotional burger. But so many had been launched already. Would yet another one excite our fans?

We believed that the time had come to change the traditional promotion set-up. Thanks to social listening we knew that many of our fans dreamt of creating their own McDonald’s Burger.

This dream was about to come true: For the first time ever, fans could create their own McDonald’s burgers. We launched a competition to find the first crowd-sourced burgers by McDonald’s Germany that would be available at McDonald’s restaurants nationwide.A premiere for both McDonald’s and its fans: For once, it was not the brand but its fans and their burger-creations that were the protagonists of the McDonald’s campaign - a risk we were excited to take!

The campaign included two media phases.

In the first phase, we aimed to involve the online community and spread the news. With our online Burger Configurator the fans could create their dream burger and submit it for public voting. We also invited the fans to create their very own online marketing campaign. With personalised and shareable videos, banners and profile pictures they could promote their burger creation via Facebook, Twitter and the VZ-Networks. Thus the news spread rapidly throughout the Social Web – purely through owned and earned media.During the second phase, the campaign became truly integrated. The winning burgers were sold at McDonald’s restaurants across Germany. Each of the five creators and their burgers were featured in their own TVCs and radio spots, which were tailored to the personality of the creator, underscoring the basic strategic idea: burgers by the fans for the fans.

More than 7m page impressions – the most successful campaign ever on the McDonald’s Germany website. Lots of Social Media buzz: 1m Facebook impressions in a single day! 116,000 burgers created – 1 every 26 seconds! 1.5m votes cast to select the most popular burgers. 21m people reached – 1 in 4 Germans!Our campaign brought more additional visitors to McDonald’s restaurants and sold more promotional burgers than any previous campaign, making it the McDonald’s campaign that generated the biggest sales ever in Germany.

Thanks to the campaign’s success with McDonald’s and its customers, we repeated it in 2012.