I’ve been meaning to get this up online for a while. It’s my entry into the 2008 Creative Planning Awards run by the Account Planning Group (APG) from my time at Leo Burnett.
It won a Gold and was McDonald’s most successful ever promotional campaign in this region.
There have been a lot of ‘name the product’ campaigns since but few before it. This ran in 2007 – before Facebook was truly mainstream. A lot of people in various agencies – and at McDonald’s – made this campaign happen.
I’ll add some commentary and analysis later.
If you’re interested in ideas and strategy, you may like to read more case studies from the 2008 Creative Planning Awards book or join the APG Facebook Page.
SYNOPSIS
This is not a story about research, a creative brief or even a briefing. It’s a story about how Planning’s tenaciousness with problems, and working collaboratively, helped save a creative brief that wasn’t producing the calibre of work we aspired to and spurred the sale of 4.2 million burgers.
Did Planning deliver an amazing brief?
No.
Did Planning catalyse an approach to solving a massive problem?
Absolutely.
Like our strategy process, this story is broken into three key sections:
Problem. Solution. Execution.
PROBLEM
Make them feel good
The problem McDonald’s handed us was:
How do we get people to feel good about eating beef at McDonald’s?
Misunderstood beef, disengaged consumers
Sales growth of McDonald’s largest category, beef burgers, was slowing. We had a mis-perception to address: despite the fact that McDonald’s beef was just like the beef consumers buy from the supermarket, people thought that it wasn’t great quality. In fact, only 34% of people thought their beef was any good. Adjectives such as ‘plastic’, ‘rubbery’, ‘unhealthy’ and ‘processed’ were bandied about. We needed to take a stand and reverse the trend.
McDonald’s had also identified a key customer segment, the Innocents, that was eating less at McDonald’s than before. Truth be told, the Innocents rarely think about McDonald’s much at all – they’ll eat there if it’s convenient but are disengaged from the brand and the category. In fact, they’re quite detached from most large brands. They are, however, a fun-loving bunch, a little suburban and unsophisticated, and they don’t take life or their food choices too seriously.
So, we had two things to focus on: firstly, McDonald’s beef was misunderstood, and, secondly, the target wasn’t paying much attention to us. The solution would be a new gourmet beef burger.
Quality beef, premium salad
The new burger would contain high quality Aussie beef with chopped white onions, garlic and fragrant herbs to make a home-style pattie. It tested well in product research with the salad ingredients perceived as more premium than traditional burger ingredients. McDonald’s was to charge $1 more for this new burger than any other burger on their menu.
A creative proposition that was a little undifferentiated
The creative proposition we were given to work with was “A new deliciously tasty beef burger” – not so unique, motivating or interestingly relevant.
A little uneasy
So, there we were: a new burger, a premium price, a disengaged target, an uninspiring creative proposition. Then, we did what any self-respecting, hoping-to-please agency would do: we tried to make it work. However, round after round of internal reviews and client presentations failed to reveal a diamond in the rough.
It was time for a reality check.
SOLUTION
We made friends with all the elephants in the room
In typical situations like this when a brief simply isn’t working, the temptation for some may be to just let the creative teams solve it. But, we were restless; we had to break the deadlock. So, at this point, we turned to two men for inspiration.
The first was John Dewey, an American psychologist, philosopher and educational reformer recognised as one of the founders of the philosophical school of ‘Pragmatism’. He’s known for coining one of our most loved phrases: “A problem well defined is a problem half solved.”
The second was Bob Gill, famed American designer. He had just toured Australia courtesy of Saatchi Design. While he was here he wrote in Creative about how a designer should spend the clear majority of their time researching the design problem they faced and only a fraction of their time solving it.
It was with these two men as our beacons of clarity and purpose that we went problem hunting – not just for product problems, but for brand problems, logistical and operational problems that were lingering around the project, to find new ways in. Every meeting we attended, every discussion we had or overheard, we banked any problem mentioned. We then played with them like Lego: we mixed and matched them, pulled them apart, flipped them, and re-arranged them.
Good Clue Hunting
Our first strategic thought was to get above the current brief and look at the larger brand issues. We discovered that one of the biggest challenges McDonald’s faced was:
People know, hate or love McDonald’s but they don’t feel involved with it
It’s seen as a big, distant multinational, easy to bash and a guilt-edged food choice. Even though the reality is either different or gradually changing, this point around involvement was our first clue. Magnifying this challenge was the fact that the target audience we had to engage was even more disengaged from the category than any other segment. We had quite an uphill battle.
We then re-considered McDonald’s brand promise: Feel good food
There are many ways to encourage people to feel good about a brand. Changing the food to reflect the ‘health conscious’ need-state was a start. But, perhaps, linking the brand problem with the brand promise would move us towards an answer?
In other words: Could we get people to feel good about our food by involving them in something?
The psychology of participation is interesting. One of the interpretations of the research that led to the Hawthorn Effect is that encouraging active participation from groups of people in decisions that will affect the group leads to a more highly engaged community.
Digging around the brand problem, the brand promise and the psychology of participation was starting to lead us into interesting areas.
We then compiled a list of all the operational and logistical issues: things like the required lead time to update the point of sale material, the number of weeks we had to sustain activity for… and the big one: We’d been workshopping and debating the name of the burger for months but still couldn’t decide on what we’d call it
Things were starting to line up. Perhaps it wasn’t just about getting people to feel good about eating McDonald’s beef. It felt like we could make a bigger splash by not just tackling the beef perceptual issue but by embracing the larger opportunity (How do we get people to feel good about McDonald’s by involving them in something?). We’d hit a strategic solution that felt bigger than the initial intent of the brief.
It was time to talk
Frequently, great ideas pop out of or are galvanised in informal settings so I caught up with one of the clients in a café to run the hypothesis by them: “What if we could get people to feel good about eating beef at McDonald’s by inviting them to name the new burger?”
Obviously, we’d need to communicate the functional stuff as well but could this be our way in?
The glint in our client’s eye pre-empted the answer: “Why not?”
Internal champions, corridor chats and collaboration
We then threw the thought at a few key people in the agency and let it float around. It stuck. Over the following days, the idea built momentum. The same thing happened client-side. People knew the original brief wasn’t working and that through a bit of lateral problem solving we may have touched on an idea bigger than the original brief.
It was decided.
We would let Australia name the new burger.
Now, we just needed some creative.
EXECUTION
The next phase of the project was interesting. We had a challenge (How do we get people to feel good about eating beef at McDonald’s?), we had a new burger and we had a strategic solution (invite people to name it). With our ducks lined up, the creative work could finally poke into some new and exciting areas.
When was the last time McDonald’s made you laugh?
An additional yet critical insight about our target audience was that they prefer advertising that entertains rather than informs. So we had to deliver a message about a new burger and how it was different (well, to the rest of the menu) but wrap it in something worthy of their attention. Also, this audience spends more time online than watching television so they are very accustomed to the goofy short-content style of YouTube. These two insights helped shape the creative execution.
After one team had deftly named the nameless burger, the NameIt Burger, another created a fictional character, Ken Thomas. He was McDonald’s burger naming legend. His recent retirement meant that the Australian public would be given the chance to name the new burger. The competition winner would gain legendary status by featuring in McDonald’s Hall of Fame in the final TVC of the campaign, plus win a Sony home entertainment system.
The scripts were witty and quirky, and more intelligent than most ads in the category. They initially set up the need for public participation because of Ken Thomas’ retirement but then (and this was expanded on via the website) showcased some of his brainstorming techniques (doing yoga, playing the piano, word association) in amusing vignettes.
The ads all ended with an invitation to name the new burger at www.nameitburger.com.au.
The campaign was then phased orchestrally
The campaign rolled out in three phases, building mini crescendos along the way. The competition to name the new burger, Phase 1, lasted 4 weeks. Phase 2 involved driving repeat purchase using consumer testimonials and a free Hot Apple Pie with every McValue Meal Purchase while we judged the names. Then, in week 7, we announced the winner who appeared in a new TVC, on the microsite and was mentioned on radio.
The winning name was The Backyard Burger.
RESULTS
Did the invitation to ‘get involved’ work?
Yes. Within the first 36 hours of the competition, a new burger name was submitted every 6 seconds and, during the 4 weeks that the competition was live, we received 143,332 valid burger name entries from 93 cities across Australia (yes, we pushed the silly names into a trash folder). We had nearly a quarter million people visit the site with 85% of them submitting a burger name. And even though the promotion was only open to the Australian public, we had visitors from 148 countries/territories worldwide (there are only 194 countries in the world).
Did the campaign sell burgers?
Yes. We sold over 4.2 million burgers and, with the testimonial ad in phase 2 and McDonald’s marketing team introducing an Apple Pie offer during the campaign, we broke the mould for McDonald’s Australia promotional burgers: sales achieved an unprecedented 12% growth across the 8 weeks of the campaign. Typically sales quieten after the first few weeks but the fact that the strategy managed to sustain sales figures in the final weeks of the campaign cemented the success of the promotion: McDonald’s Australia acknowledged that it was one of the most successful promotional campaigns in McDonald’s history.
What others have thought about it
Channel 9 MSN Australia has touted the campaign “one of the biggest online promotions ever conducted in Australia”
“A Current Affair” showcased the campaign in a segment about the best ads on TV – interviewing our own “Ken Thomas” about his experience with the commercial
It won APMA 2008 GOLD – Best activity generating brand awareness and trial
It earned a spot on the Cannes 2008 Direct Marketing Shortlist
CONCLUSION
This paper asks its readers to consider the approach and role of Planning beyond the brief where an investigative, questioning inclination and a never-say-die attitude can take brands into areas that would have remained unexplored.
In this case, without Planning’s tenacious interrogation of the problem, and collaborative problem solving approach involving creatives, clients and (all) planning disciplines, McDonald’s would have simply had one more promotional burger with one more promotional campaign on their hands.
Instead, Planning tackled a bigger brand problem (‘un-involvement’), drove collaborative thinking into a richer creative territory (the NameIt Burger), which in turn motivated a disengaged target to embrace the nameless (then named) new beef burger.
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