2018 Winners & Shortlists

KHAIR ALLAH

BrandMCDONALD'S
Product/ServiceMCDONALD'S CSR
EntrantFP7/CAI Cairo, EGYPT
CategoryBusiness Citizenship / Corporate Responsibility
Idea Creation FP7/CAI Cairo, EGYPT
Media Placement DIGITAL REPUBLIC Cairo, EGYPT

The Campaign

The creative idea was to transform this box into our main medium of telling our story. A story of underprivileged children who until now did not have access to proper education. How could we make this donation box a window onto a harsh reality of millions’ of students’ lives in Egypt. The box was going to be the medium, the message, and the result of the campaign all at once.

Execution

The idea was to get one of the children from Khairallah Village to write the message on the donation box itself. We asked the child to write “Donation Box for developing education at Khairallah Village”. What we got from the child was a statement with multiple spelling mistakes. A great attempt from a great kid who tried to phonetically spell out the words as best as he possibly could. McDonald’s took this statement as is, and placed it on all its donation boxes across the country. For 48 hours, McDonald’s was under attack for claiming to better education, when they themselves couldn’t spell. Once enough people were talking about the misspell, we launched a video revealing that the message on the box was written by a child who wasn’t getting the education he deserves. We coupled the video with a hashtag that said “If it bothers you, change it”.

The reactions of the people were incredible. In just the first 12 hours of the video launch, the video had been viewed by over a million people. McDonald’s became the brand everyone was talking about online and praising it for puling such a bold move to get the people’s attention for such an important cause. Influencers apologized to McDonald’s for being so harsh on them and encouraged their fans to help McDonald’s collect more money for this initiative. In just one month, the number of donations increased by 143% and reached figures it had never reached before since the day this initiative had been launched.

The Situation

Since 2009, McDonald’s had been actively communicating its CSR campaign to no avail. Despite mass media campaigns the awareness levels were still low and donations weren’t negligible. But this year, McDonald’s decided to do things differently. It treated the campaign differently. It wasn’t a typical TV campaign, rather it set out to create a debate, a controversial conversation around the initiative. The effect was felt immediately with more than 1 million Egyptians engaging with the content within 48 hours from its launch. People not only knew about McDonald’s initiative, but they were commenting, liking, asking and most importantly donating.

The Strategy

The strategy was to stop spending money to beat around the bush. We didn’t need a TV ad to get people to notice a donation box in store. We didn’t need a mass media campaign, we just needed people at the store to act! We needed people to notice the initiative right there, as they stood in line waiting to make their order. The strategy was to get everyone standing in line to reach for their wallets and donate right then and there! To do so we’d need to provoke them. Standing in line at McDonald’s all you really want are your fries, you’re not interested in anything else. Knowing that, we had to disturb people amidst their waiting time, disturb them enough to notice us and not brush us off as an accessory on the counter.

Credits

Name Company Role
Ahmed Hafez Younis FP7/CAI Executive Creative Director
Rami El Kerdani FP7/CAI Creative Director
Rana Khairy FP7/CAI Senior Copywriter
Moemen El Siwi FP7/CAI Art Director
Fadila Al Assiouty FP7/CAI Copywriter
Farah Mansour FP7/CAI Account Director
Youssef El Tohamy FP7/CAI Account Manager
Sherwet Salah FP7/CAI Account Executive
Naila Fattouh FP7/CAI Head of Planning
Moustafa El Dabbagh FP7/CAI Senior Planning Manager
Ahmed Koura N/A Director
Adham Zahran N/A DOP
Youssef M. Hodroj N/A Assistant Director/ Videography
Links
Video URL