2015 Winners & Shortlists

The Campaign

In the GCC, the Islamic culture has high influence on broadcast official regulations. Too much “skin”, promotion of smoking, alcohol and controversial content related to religion and or culture are all banned. TV stations have a filter on the quality of production for liquid content, brands can abide by regulations and still TV stations reserve the right to reject the content. Finally, in the incidence of co-creating content with TV stations, the stations do not allow presence of brand representatives during the shoot so brands run the risk of agreeing on guidelines and not seeing the final product before it airs. For online, no official regulation bodies exist, yet telecoms and global platforms such as Google are filtering extreme content that crosses the line of religion and culture. This allows clients to be a bit more daring when compared to TV and the only barrier here is consumer tolerance.

Results

Compared to its competition, McDonald’s in the GCC was perceived to offer less menu variety due to its focus on its core menu. So to keep its 20 to 29 years old audience from walking away and discovering new tastes elsewhere, McDonald’s revived its “Tastes of the World” program, bringing 4 new burgers inspired by culinary delights from around the world. With the World Cup approaching, football was in everyone’s conversation, not only that of the usual hardcore fan. That young adults may know they are not too football savvy, they still want to belong to the cheer like hardcore fans and lead heated football debates and ride the football fever like true football connoisseurs. Although 2014 was going to be the year of football distraction and clutter, we still needed to promote those 4 burgers, drive their sales and re-energize McDonald’s variety offering. Since the Tastes of the World offers new burgers inspired by from different nations we saw the world cup as an opportunity for McDonald’s to pay tribute to the competing teams by dedicating each of the 4 sandwiches to a national team. McDonald’s consequently tweaked the recipes of the 4 burgers and brought a French, a Brazilian, an Italian and an Argentinian seasoned burger. We then created 4 novice football fan video manuals we called fanuals. These fanuals could arm any football novice with a humorous crash course about the history of the team they supported, through a compilation of vox pops, insta facts and stand-up comedy sessions, hence making them true world cup connoisseurs! The stand-up comedy chapter offered an amusing review or account of the World Cup and teams highlights, the “VOX Cup” tested people’s knowledge in football and the insta-facts chapter told fun facts about the four teams representing the burgers.

The 4 episodes were hosted on McDonald's Arabia YouTube Page which we then promoted on Facebook an YouTube with Paid Media with a total views of 1 million.

The campaign reached 40% of our target audience on Facebook and generated 400% higher engagement rate compared to the industry benchmark. On YouTube, we generated 2.2 million views out of which 52% were full views versus the industry’s average of 14 %. The campaign generated an increase of 14% in sales versus previous “Taste of the World” seasons and most importantly elevated the Brand KPI of “Comes out with new menu items I like” moving it up by 3 percentage points, a score that had been flat for the past 12 months.