McDonald’s McText and Win

Background

McDonald’s wanted to do something big and different for their height-of-the-holidays summer promotion which ran from 26 December 2002 to 31 January 2003. To attract the important younger market, they developed a text and win competition with Touchpoint, who provided the technology to manage this nationwide campaign. In addition to upselling customers in store, it was McDonald’s aim to establish a platform from which to communicate with customers in the future.

Objectives

• Sell more Combo meals
• Sell more Supercombo meals
• Build a permission based database of customers who opt-in to receive McDonald’s communications by mobile phone

Target Audience

McDonald’s customers – specifically 15-24 year olds

Channels

Touchpoint implemented/managed the following components of the campaign:

• SMS text messaging

Other components:

• TV
• Radio
• Outdoor advertising
• In store point of sale

Approach

• TV, radio and outdoor advertising alerted the country to this competition
• In store posters and point of sale highlighted the promotion to customers to encourage purchases of Combos and Supercombos
• Each Combo purchaser received one McText game card with an entry code
• Each Supercombo purchaser received two McText game cards with entry codes
• Customers texted their codes to a number to instantly see if they won
• Customers automatically received a reply that told them their prize if they won, asked them if they wanted to opt in to receive future promotions and gave them the number of chances they had to win a grand prize (1 code = 1 chance)
• 1 in 5 entrants won from an instant prize pool including McDonald’s food, Telecom Mobile airtime and phones, Nintendo Gamecubes and games, Philips CD players or FujiFilm digital cameras
• The grand prize included 16 return trips for two to Australia

How Touchpoint Technology Helped

• Touchpoint technology handled 50,000+ entries per day over five weeks with peaks around meal times
• Awarded prizes and provided details to McDonald’s for fulfilment
• Automated fulfilment of Telecom airtime prizes with Telecom
• Handled dynamic messaging and prize allocation based on:
  • Whether the customer was eligible for Telecom airtime prizes (they had to enter from a Telecom mobile phone)
  
  
  • Whether the customer subscribed for future promotions or not
• Kept count and reported total number of valid entries and chances for each customer for the grand prize
• Managed the valid entry database as well as the opt in database
• Enabled real time, web-based tracking of entries and allocation of prizes

Results

Arguably New Zealand’s most successful text marketing campaign to date, the McDonald’s McText promotion broke the 1.5 million text message barrier in 5 weeks, awarded close to 300,000 prizes and had approximately 15% of respondents opt in to receive future promotions by text message.

Touchpoint’s part in the campaign met all of McDonald’s targets in terms of innovation, consumer response rate, speed of response, accuracy and return on investment. This campaign gave McDonald’s an immediate and extraordinarily accurate picture of response patterns, which allowed them to fine tune the campaign as it developed. It was an unqualified success.