The Campaign

To stay competitive in the highly contested food delivery category, we had to identify how we maximise McDonald’s biggest strengths – the breadth of their store network and the depth of their owned data - to unlock the potential of every restaurant. Previously we didn’t factor-in variances in local restaurant capacity for McDelivery in advertising. In a global first for any brand in any category, we mapped real-time restaurant-level data to paid search spend and messaging via a live API, to create a dynamic capacity-based search advertising model based on live restaurant data. If demand spikes in an area and delivery wait time is compromised, search spend in the area decreases immediately in response. In areas where there was excess capacity,spends were pushed up and the ad copy celebrates the low wait time. This initiative has proven to be a runaway success in Singapore and is becoming a global initiative.

Creative Execution

The Capacity Based Search Advertising System for McDelivery is designed as an always-on system that keeps track of demand and supply of McDelivery in Singapore, reacts to different scenarios and automatically decides the media bid price and Ad copy to be delivered in a specific neighbourhood– all in real time. The solution is housed in the Google script programming environment which is readily available in AdWords and Google Drive, and makes use of the McDonald's McDelivery Status API, refreshed every 5 mins. It takes query responses extracted from the API and transforms them into variables which are compatible with AdWords Scripts which then act as triggers to the campaign management process. Here is how it works: 1. Singapore is divided into more than 25 neighbourhoods using Google’s hyper-local targeting capability. 2. A real-time data feed (API) into McDonald’s nation-wide delivery management system is set up to access customer delivery wait time by neighbourhood every 5 minutes. 3. Using a custom-built coding script, neighbourhoods are then categorised as high, medium or low capacity in real time as demand fluctuates. 4. A set of capacity-based media activation rules in Google AdWords determine how aggressive spends would be in each neighbourhood and what messages would be served – all optimised in real-time. If capacity went up so did search spend levels and the creative celebrated a lower wait time. If capacity went down search spend levels dropped. Ads were paused altogether in neighbourhoods that were not able to deliver due to high demand.