Social media have been flooded with fake news about McDonald’s. And new stories keep popping up, getting read and shared by millions of people, which obviously create distrust in McDonald’s.

These clickbait stories may seem like an impossible ‘opponent’ when the task is getting the Danes to understand and believe the truth about McDonald’s Denmark – especially when the clickbait stories are so much more interesting than the (boring) truth.

We needed to debunk the myths that Danes believe about McDonald’s Denmark and start raising their trust in the brand – and maybe even move them towards being less prone to believing the next fake news story about McDonald’s.

We created 14 Facebook posts and launched them one-by-one from ‘The Fast News’ Facebook page. Each post had a carefully crafted headline without any false statements about McDonald’s, but at the same time it prompted the myth that we wished to attack.

When clicking a post, you would open an article on ‘The Fast News’ website. On the website, you could read and share more clickbait stories thus spreading the campaign.

To avoid a spam effect, we applied a reach and frequency strategy to ensure that we reached as many as possible within our target audience, but at the same time made sure that people only saw the same post once but at least three different posts.

To follow up on Facebook users who did not click the posts, we launched clickbait videos that revealed the truth behind the myth only a few seconds after the clickbait headline was shown.