The best Counter-Strike team in the world right now is Danish and the Danish TV-stations are beginning to broadcast some of the big esport events. Therefore, McDonald’s had a great window of opportunity to give a public high five to the gaming community and both make some fun but also speak their language.

The objectives of the campaign was to connect McDonalds’s with a hard-to-reach target audience, gamers, and get them to talk about the initiative.

McDonald’s in Denmark wanted to enforce their relationship with a huge but hard to reach audience: gamers. So we created simple ads (billboards, facebook, Instagram, snapchat and inside games) where we named McDonald’s products with the equivalent in gaming lingo. A cheeseburger was called “eco round” which means economic round, where players save money. A Happy Meal called “noob” which means “beginner” - and so on.

McDonald’ wanted to cut through the clutter in a community, where the usual advertising is having a hard time getting noticed. The PR strategy was to first engage top influencers through one of the primary platforms for gaming news, Reddit. After trending on Reddit and on the social profiles of top influential gaming personalities, the path to the gaming journalists was paved.

The campaign was both targeted at gamers, but also shown in public media to emphasize the support to the specific audience, although a lot of the viewers would not understand it and maybe feel intrigued.

A week prior to the biggest esport event in the country, we launched the campaign on different media: traditional and digital billboards on the train stations closest to the event. Also, on social media: facebook and Instagram, targeting gamers and people geographically close to the event. And furthermore we launched digital billboards on counter-strike servers, so gamers could watch the ads inside the game. Outdoor was aired for one week while the digital executions ran for a few weeks more.

The campaign went viral and picked up by media in 18 countries with more than 110.000.000 potential impressions. The media wrote about it, the biggest CS-analysts, influencers and hosts tweeted about it, and it was the most upvoted post on Reddit past year. (Counter-Strike subreddit 1. feb 2019).

Fans photoshopped translations on the pictures for the russian fanbase and other brands made "spoofs" with the same words on their products.