2016 Winners & Shortlists

Brief Explanation

McDonald’s is a market leader in the Quick Service Restaurants category in Egypt. It mainly targets families with kids, teens, and young working adults, all of which look for premium quality food with good value for money. McDonald’s core values include high Quality of food that is served; providing excellent Service to its consumers; Cleanliness in every aspect of the restaurant, from the food that is served to the store’s ambience; and Value for money in every product offering.

The Brief

“Quality” being one of McDonald’s core values, has always been given importance in communication for the brand. For years, quality messages of ingredients have been passed on to consumers via flyers, tray-mats, and posters; communication usually involved extensive facts about where the ingredients came from and how they are cooked. The brief received was simply to yet again communicate quality messages of five different ingredients (beef, chicken, vegetables, potatoes, eggs) on the tray-mat, which is given with every in-store order made at McDonald’s.

How the final design was conceived

Because tray-mats are given to each consumer that places an order at the store, they serve as a perfect communication medium. Consumers however have always used them as a sheet-like-plates instead; they squirt ketchup on them to dip their fries in, throw out pickles from their sandwiches on them, use them as coasters for their drinks… rarely do they read anything that is on them. Our challenge was to find an interesting way to tell consumers about our fresh ingredients on a medium that was often ignored. So we redesigned the tray-mat into an engaging two-way communication channel, giving it a more interesting fate than where it usually ended up. Instead of having another boring tray-mat with paragraphs of facts written on it, the design of the tray-mat took a more playful direction. It was split into six different squares; one contained information about McDonald’s fine quality and the other five showed the main food ingredients of McDonald's (beef, chicken, vegetables, egg and potato), stating quality facts about them. To further entice consumers with the game, we created an offer; if they successfully complete an origami shape, they get a free menu item corresponding to that main ingredient.

Indication of how successful the outcome was in the market

By offering our consumers a fun activity, we managed to turn a stagnant medium to an in-store interactive way of getting our message across, revealing a fact about each ingredient once its shape was completed. The campaign was a success, creating an unusual bond between the brand and the consumer. Even though the average redemption rate of any in-store coupon-based promotion McDonald’s carries out is around 10%, this promotion managed to reach double that with a redemption rate of 20%. The consumers got the information they needed to know about McDonald’s quality in an interesting and engaging way.