Building on the momentum created with Saweetie’s personal menu hack, McDonald’s leaned into a fan truth: “Everyone has a favorite hack to make a meal uniquely their own '' to make fans famous by creating a campaign based on a twist (hack?) on their Famous Orders.
Tasking us with leveraging influencers to generate awareness and foot traffic for the National Menu Hacks campaign. We needed to inspire, entertain and educate fans about how the program works and is inspired by real-world fan behaviors.
Menu Hacks was a brand first, inspired by a TikTok trend, rooted in an audience truth. To match the moment we leveraged two Tik Tok’s innovative and creative products, The Branded Hashtag Challenge and Branded Effect.
Uncovering cultural insights and purchase behaviors, we paired influencers with menu hacks that over-indexed in their respective markets alongside creative messaging that resonated to our diverse audiences. Asian American partnered with family-friendly influencers that Gen Z admired, to feature the Surf + Turf. While Latino youth resonated with comedic influencers that often feature their family, which we paired content with the Hash Brown McMuffin.
Building off these cultural insights and creative casting, paid media ensured we reached our target demographic, matched against the creative execution.
We chose to leverage TikTok as a platform in order to have access to the groundbreaking products that were offered by the platform. The ability to interact and engage with the community using the Hashtag and Branded Effects challenge was stronger than other opportunities offered by other social platforms.
We ran the campaign in two phases with different messaging.
The first centered around Educating audiences on different Menu Hacks and amplifying content through the Hashtag challenge.
The second focused on Engagement and encouraging users to interact with the Branded Effects challenge.
McDonald’s Menu Hacks over delivered across all performance indicators of success for this TikTok campaign. Effectively reaching multicultural youth through moving them down the funnel from mass reach, brand engagement to ultimately driving sales.
Delivering 7.8B video views on Menu Hacks Hashtag Challenge page in 30 days.
1.82M+ videos created using #mcdonaldshacks or branded effect, generating 361M+ Likes, 12M+ Comments & 20M+ Shares
Delivered an effective $0.03-$0.09 cost per visit (QSR benchmark is $0.31)
The Hashtag Challenge (HTC) page (#mcdonaldshacks) garnered 2.66B Video Views within 3 days, meeting TikTok’s benchmark of 2.19~2.75b.
The Branded Effect garnered 3.38M Video Views, meeting TikTok’s benchmark of 2M~13M views over that timeframe.
