McDonald's
Menu Hacks
Overview
Drive Brand Awareness and Sales
Partners
W+K NYC, OMD Chicago
Platform
TikTok
Influencers
Brand
The Stats
The Approach
When McDonald’s partnered with hip hop stars like Travs Scott and Saweetie to create meals based on their personal menu hacks, the company enjoyed its biggest marketing success story in years. Building off that momentum, McDonald’s leaned into a fan truth: Everyone (not just celebs) has a favorite hack to make a meal uniquely their own. Thus, the National Menu Hacks campaign was born.
McDonald’s tasked us with leveraging influencers to generate awareness and foot traffic for the National Menu Hacks campaign. Our influencers would need to effectively entertain and educate fans. Showing them how the program works while inspiring them to try it themselves.
Uncovering cultural insights and purchase behaviors, we paired diverse influencers with menu hacks that over-indexed in their respective markets. Our chosen talent then developed original messaging content that would uniquely resonate with our diverse audiences. These cultural insights combined with creative casting and paid media ensured us success in reaching our target demographic, matched against the creative execution.
Menu Hacks was a brand first for McDonald’s. A campaign wholly inspired by a TikTok trend and rooted in an audience truth. Utilizing two of Tik Tok’s most innovative and creative products: the Branded Hashtag Challenge and Branded Effect, we overwhelmingly matched the moment with astounding results. Inspired by our creator content and the thrill of interacting with the branded Menu Hack digital art, fans filmed and shared their own TikToks using #mcdonaldshacks.
The Result
An impressive 1.82M+ fans created TikToks using #mcdonaldshacks. The McDonald’s Menu Hacks campaign overdelivered across all performance success indicators and met all TikTok benchmarks. Attracting billions of views overnight, hundreds of millions of likes and tens of millions of comments and shares. The campaign effectively reached multicultural youth and moved them down the purchase funnel from mass reach to brand engagement and ultimately to driving sales. And in unprecedented numbers.