Background

The food delivery category in Singapore is growing phenomenally, with the introduction of Food Delivery Aggregators such as Food Panda, Deliveroo, the former UberEats and GrabFood all fuelling the category’s growth spurt. Though McDonald’s has been a pioneer in this category with the launch of McDelivery in 2005, the growth of these Food Delivery Aggregators made them a viable competitor. Instead of letting its market share be eroded, McDonald’s recognised an opportunity to strategically partner with one of the aggregators, GrabFood, and leverage their customer base and delivery riders to not only maintain its market share, but also drive incremental sales. Through the smart use of media and real-time data signals – what we call Capacity-Based McDelivery 2.0 – McDonald’s was able to optimise the use of both its McDelivery service and GrabFood riders to ensure the brand still made the sale, regardless of the delivery channel.

Describe the creative idea

To make the McDonald’s partnership with GrabFood successful and leverage it as an alternative delivery channel, we needed to promote the association, build awareness of the fact that McDonald’s was now available on the service, while creating top-of-mind recall for the McDonald’s brand. Prior to the campaign, consumers were aware of the Grab ride-hailing app. However, GrabFood had only launched 6 months ago and market awareness was low. Operating as a separate app to Grab limited the organic awareness of the partnership. Therefore, our first objective was to increase consumer awareness for McDonald’s on GrabFood by +10%. The next objective was to increase sales for McDonald’s by leveraging GrabFood riders to enhance its capabilities in fulfilling demand for delivery orders when McDelivery riders were fully occupied. Therefore, we set out to attain a +3% increase in sales on GrabFood, to deliver an incremental contribution to McDonald’s total delivery sales.

Describe the strategy

McDonald’s has already enjoyed significant success through a “World-First Technology” capacity-based algorithm to dial up or down media spending based on the real-time capacity of its McDelivery service. This has reduced media wastage while enhancing the customer experience with the brand, by stopping ads to customers in areas where the wait time is longer than 60 minutes. To take this award-winning strategy one step further and deliver incremental business growth for McDonald’s, we continued serving the ads so that McDonald’s doesn’t lose out on any customer orders. However, we simply switched where we directed the orders to - effectively leveraging the brand’s partnership with GrabFood to fulfil the incremental orders. In yet another World-First Media approach, McDonald’s was able to make even more effective use of its media spends, ultimately driving incremental revenue for the brand while ensuring customers across Singapore were able to enjoy their favourite meal.

Describe the execution

To overcome low awareness of the GrabFood service and capitalise on the ride-hailing app’s customer base, McDonald’s took-over the Grab app for 2 weeks, transforming its vehicle icons into McDonald’s colours. We also leveraged Waze to target users searching for McDonald’s on the navigation app, transforming the in-app icons to green (GrabFood’s colour) McDonald’s Fries. Once awareness was established and customers were ready to order via either channel, we cleverly deployed media advertising to strategically direct customers to each platform. Using proprietary award-winning technology, we optimised sales in high-demand/low-capacity neighbourhoods by mapping McDonald’s delivery hubs' data on Search Marketing Platforms, switching ads from McDelivery to GrabFood when wait-times were high! We also geo-fenced historical high-demand/low-capacity neighbourhoods and upweighted campaign messaging in these areas to drive incremental sales via GrabFood. All this done real-time and dynamically, leveraging GrabFood as an extension of the McDelivery service to drive business growth for McDonald’s!

List the results

Not only did we double the awareness of the McDonald’s-GrabFood partnership (from 24% to 50%), we also drove a substantial increase in McDonald’s sales, allowing the brand to fulfil orders that would have gone elsewhere: • +56% increase in McDonald’s sales via GrabFood, exceeding targets by 53% pts! • +16% uplift in overall delivery sales - for a well-established brand like McDonald’s with significant market share, this shift is major! Here are the words of a very satisfied client: “Our objective was to strengthen our delivery leadership via our new partnership with GrabFood, using a fun and impactful visual mnemonic that ties in with our brand. Key to the success of the campaign was the innovative use of digital – creatively embedding the visual mnemonic in everyday digital touchpoints, layering sharp targeting and optimisations, based on real-time operational capacity, thereby driving incremental sales for McDonald’s.” – Agatha Yap, Senior Director