McDonald's: 'Breakfast Extension'

A deep dive into McDonald’s sales data brought to light a fascinating insight into the behaviours of breakfast seekers. McDonald's were under the most pressure in the final 30 minutes of their breakfast service, from 10:00 – 10:30am - and the reason why became apparent in qualitative research; our competitors were all serving their equivalent fare for 30 minutes longer, until 11am.

So rather than rush to beat McDonald’s last breakfast orders, they were heading to another joint in a more leisurely fashion. They didn’t necessarily prefer our competitors offerings; they just enjoyed the later finish. So, the decision was taken to extend McDonald’s Breakfast until 11am, to level the playing field. We just had to tell everyone about it.

Solution: Listen for longer. We wanted the extended Breakfast hours to feel like a BIG DEAL, and so were on the lookout for a BIG DEAL in media. Radio felt the natural place to start, with more listeners tuning into the breakfast daypart than any other time of day.

So we persuaded Global Radio to extend their breakfast shows until 11am, to match the new extended Breakfast hours at McDonald’s, and turn it into a platform celebrating this exciting new development, meddling with not one, but FOUR stations usual breakfast service.

On Capital Xtra and Chris Moyles' Radio X breakfast show we tweaked the timings so each show ran until 11am Monday to Friday, serving up an extra hour of music, guests and McDonald’s breakfast giveaways and prizes.

Whilst on Heart and Capital breakfast favourites Jamie, Amanda and Roman all extended their breakfast presence by invading the mid-morning shows for an hour, and even went into a local store and worked a breakfast shift for a segment.

Result: 1.1% sales uplift over 6 weeks, (extra 60 customers per day, per restaurant) driving an extra 7.3m in revenue - and most importantly, an 11am finish for Maccas breakfast evermore.

The campaign went on to win Gold for Media Partnerships and a Silver for Agency Media Idea at the 2020 Media Week Awards.