McDonald's: '#McSpicyDebate'

McDonald's is best known for it's beef burgers, but wanted to grow market share in the Chicken category in an attempt to get Gen-Z audiences to re-evaluate their credentials amongst popular peers, like Nando's and KFC.

They briefed us wanting to launch a new, limited-edition chicken product that claimed to be their spiciest burger yet - the McSpicy. So we needed to find a smart way to get people talking, and most importantly, trying it.

We knew we needed to lean into the claim of 'our spiciest burger yet', but spice is subjective - and for this target audience, who are chicken connoisseurs, their tolerance to spice is a badge of honour. Insights told us our audience were quite susceptible to the odd social media #humblebrag, so we decided to spark the #McSpicyDebate - a real-time social campaign that asks the nation to decide how spicy the McSpicy really is, before replaying it back to the public to keep the conversation and hype going.

The idea was baked into everything - starting on packaging with a variety of 'spicy' comments to set the tone, before the TVC set to Nelly's 'Hot In Herre' (created by Leo Burnett) showcasing people sampling the burger went live.

We then stoked the fires with several strategic partnerships, first via a content piece with LADBible, conducting a McSpicy taste test with real punters, which was quickly followed-up with supporting engagement driving-formats from Snap (lenses and filters) and Twitter (Hashtag, Trends and Polls) to get a temperature check from the wider nation on just how hot our customers were finding it. We even pulled through some of the comments as real-time tweets, based on four different colour grades of 'spiciness', as posters in Digital OOH. And it worked.

Social and PR caught fire. @McDonaldsUK received 5x more mentions compared to an average day.
#McSpicy was Tweeted about more times in a week than KFC’s Zinger was in the previous 6 months.
And then, the McSpicy SOLD OUT, everywhere.

When stock replenished, we offered people free milk to get tongues wagging once more as an in-app incentive, which also helped McDonald's drive a significant number of new app sign-ups (not originally a campaign KPI) and the McSpicy has helped McDonald's grow it's chicken share in the category as a regularly returning feature on the menu ever since.