Outlook is cloudy for McDonald’s mood app
If you’ve been on YouTube this morning, you’ve probably been boinked squarely between the eyes by the McDonald’s home page takeover.
If you follow the link, it’s an apparently ambitious digital campaign that looks like its merely fails in the execution.
The “food for any mood” execution attempts to share consumers’ moods across Australia, feed in real time data such as the weather, mix it with localised information before chucking in a soupcon of social media.
Or that’s how it seems.
But either it’s fallen over, or it’s a bit of a shoddy attempt to con consumers that it’s a better execution than it actually is.
Once you tell the application how you’re feeling (the choice include the likes of stoked, excited, starving, chuffed and so on…) by clicking on a funky little avatar, you get the chance to see what the rest of Australia thinks – and why that might be.
Its theory includes something about a forthcoming local event and one on the weather.
- Apparently WA is feeling Zzzz because “it’s a cloudy day”
- The Top End is starving because “it’s a cloudy day”
- NSW is undecided because “it’s a cloudy day”
- NSW is “game on” because “it’s a cloudy day”
- Victoria is starving ebcause “it’s a cloudy day”
- Tasmania is Zzzz because “it’s a cloudy day”
- SA is Game On becasue “it’s a cloudy day”
You get the idea – if all that cloud turns to rain then Australia’s drought emergency is over forever.
And curiously enough, whichever emotion you choose, the application tells you that you apperently share it with 9% of the population. And with 13 options to choose from, that adds up to 117%.
The bells and whistles are similarly lacking when it comes to the social media element. Choosing the Twitter option for instance simply generates the somewhat spammy message “Thinking about which McDonald’s Meal Deal goes with my current mood”, plus a link to the McDonald’s site.
Now the charitable possibility is that this is indeed a brave attempt to blend real time info with user input and that the feed has broken or malfunctioned in some way.
But the more suspicious side of me wonders whether this is a case of digital dishonesty – for the five minutes or so a user might play with the site, they may not even notice that aren’t getting genuine information. And with luck they’ll have tweeted their status by then.
Pragmatically I wonder if the agency (McDonald’s usually uses Tribal DDB although I’ve not confrmed that yet) sold in a big digital idea but found itself unable to execute it with the time and budget available. Once you’ve locked in a day for a home page takeover of YouTube then your deadline is set, particularly as the digital component is part of a bigger above the line campaign around McDonald’s lunch deals which broke at the weekend.
Does it matter anyway? If the site doesn’t really do what it pretends, but fools the consumer, then perhaps it’s harmless enough?
But as this is designed to draw in the more digitally savvy punters, I’m not sure it will successfully fool them. And what will it then do to their trust in the brand?
Tim Burrowes
Tim Burrowes founded Mumbrella in 2008. He worked on Mumbrella until 2021. At various points he was editor, content director and editor-at-large.
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didn’t work for me – seemed to hang. after 40 seconds gave up.
Apparently the agency in question even linked to the wrong site for a while: http://forums.whirlpool.net.au.....80134.html
It’s all a bit fail, really.
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In case you hadn’t noticed. It was cloudy and raining on the weekend.
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Brad, yep it was raining and cloudy over the weekend but not across Australia methinks
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Can’t stand the TVC’s or the online stuff for this campaign
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Saw the ad, clicked then waited too long for Flash website to load.
By that stage I had already bought a whopper and fries from Hungry Jacks….
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This game sounds terrible.
However fun for the whole family is going into McDonalds and asking what type of fish is in the fish burger.
So far, the results have been:
“fish” (even when pressed for further information)
“sea fish”
“swimming fish”
— fyi, this is a real life game and not a social media device.
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For me every mood is shared by 6% of the nation.
Shame I like the avatars. They act better than teh blue kittehs.
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not sure what they are trying to achieve but it didn’t work.
Now, back to the topic of regulating junk food advertising….
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I cant even find anywhere easily what the actual meal deals are. How is this supposed to translate into sales for them?
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FAIL for McD’s
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Hi Tim,
The McDonald’s ‘Mood of the Nation’ microsite is a light-hearted and playful extension to the integrated ‘Love Food For Any Mood’ campaign. With product awareness and retail messaging being driven largely by TV and outdoor, the role of the microsite is to provide additional brand-focused engagement and to use the emoticons, a fundamentally digital icon, to help spread awareness of the brand and the campaign through social channels.
Despite running smoothly for the first week of the campaign launch, for two hours yesterday the weather feed link to the McDonald’s ‘Mood of the Nation’ site was broken. This issue was fixed within 90 minutes of your article posting. The weather feed on the site is taken from Australia’s leading source the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) in Australia, and Views in New Zealand and is updated every six hours.
Regarding the error with the nation’s emotions, these are calculated dynamically from our database which supplies multiple feeds to support the microsite. The feed specifically relates to the nation’s moods as well as your own. Yesterday this aspect of the site was not updating once you selected your first mood, thus did not update if you changed your mood. This is currently being re-linked.
As per the intended plan for the McDonald’s ‘Mood of the Nation’ social media campaign, extended capabilities will be added from next week in the form of a Facebook application that links to the site and allows it to post your mood to your facebook page and share it further.
In the first 24 hours of the campaign, website visitation was up fourfold on unique ID’s with 64% of that traffic coming direct and not via search engines. 86% were first time visitors to the site this month.
Charles Rallings
Managing Director
Tribal DDB Sydney
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Guh?
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Charles with that explanation you may as well have just blamed the intern.
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Of course the visitation are going to be high!!! with an execution the size it was and the media money spent on it…startergy/insight holly molly was this your idea charles
No wonder tribal DDB isn’t doing anything exciting or amazing these days! Same old stuff and full of mistakes. I guess that’s what you pay for if you use TribalDDB Sydney. I hear Melbourne office was better
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one would expect significant traffic increases with such large media placements.
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An over-cooked idea, over-corrected
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It’s not good Maccas digital work. It’s a bad TV idea that is a compromise because the target audience was not narrowed down. An emoticon is a textual expression that is so 1997. Tribal just go back to doing your own ideas. Stop trying to make bad DDB TV ideas work online. ‘ Nobody counts the number of ads you run; they just remember the impression you make’ Bill Brenbach
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Was as bored with the explanation as I was with the microsite…
“Regarding the error with the nation’s emotions, these are calculated dynamically from our database which supplies multiple feeds to support the microsite. The feed specifically relates to the nation’s moods as well as your own. Yesterday this aspect of the site was not updating once you selected your first mood, thus did not update if you changed your mood. This is currently being re-linked.”
Stop Charles. Please. Salt into the wound.
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It’s all my fault. I’m sorry.
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