After fielding roughly 6,000 questions online about its food, McDonald’s Canada is taking the conversation “offline” with a new advertising campaign.
In June, McDonald’s Canada launched an interactive digital platform, “Our Food. Your Questions,” in an effort to be more transparent with consumers about where its food comes from and how it’s made. Consumers asked everything from calorie counts of certain menu items to why McDonald’s burgers and fries don’t rot when left out for a long period of time.
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McDonald’s has now launched an integrated advertising campaign to reach even more Canadians and invite them to join the conversation online.
The program “exceeded all our expectations and we learned from customer feedback that this is an important opportunity for us to continue and evolve the dialogue with our customers,” said Joel Yashinsky, chief marketing officer at Toronto-based McDonald’s Canada.
“We wanted to broaden it so that the reach allowed all customers in Canada to be aware of the program and ask any questions they had about our food.”
Created by Tribal DDB, the agency behind the new platform, the campaign includes a 30-second TV spot, wild postings, video projections on buildings and transit dominations in key markets across Canada.
The TV spot shows questions from the website with behind-the-scenes shots from McDonald’s operations, for example a burger getting prepped for a photo shoot after the question, “Why does your food look different in the advertising than what’s in store?”
Meanwhile, video projections on buildings in urban centres will feature select questions and answers–some still and some full-motion with answers that were done on video.
“It will [give] a surprise to people in those areas to see the projection of these questions that are very provocative and raise the awareness of the program,” said Yashinsky.
Since the program launched, a team at McDonald’s has answered nearly 6,000 questions using text, photos and videos. According to the company, the website has had more two million interactions with users averaging four minutes on the site.
While the ad campaign will run for four weeks, Yashinsky said the platform “is going to run forever… We think this is a great two-way conversation for us to have with our customers that we don’t want to end.”
To read more about the “Our Food. Your Questions” platform, check out the Oct. 8 issue of Marketing.
