McDonald’s
McRib
After 10 years of speculating about its return, McRib’s fandom was reaching fever pitch. The stage was set for our legendary multi-channel McRib campaign.
Our Idea
With the iconic burger finally set to return, we decided to drive its fans crazy by making a few “mistakes”. We began with an “accidental” test notification sent to all 20 million McDonald’s UK app users; all it said was, “McRib_Test.notifcation 16.10.24(TEST)”. Cue internet meltdown. We then added more fuel to the fire by prematurely revealing posters (then covering them back up), mistakenly playing out unfinished TV ads, and broadcasting corrupted sound files in every McDonald’s restaurant in the country.
The Effect
The results were ground-breaking … the speculation generated the biggest spike in the product-related search since 2021, increased mentions +850% on social media and made McRib the no.1 trending topic on X. And it wasn’t only a niche segment of McDonald’s fandom who were raving about McRib. We managed to send the media into a frenzy too with 1,000+ press articles and £6 million in earned media (with only £1.9m media spend). Additionally, all of the speculation and hype resulted in incredibly high levels of LTO product awareness, at 93%. This was the highest we’ve seen for an LTO in the past three years, well above the average.