MCDELIVERY X GRABFOOD LAUNCH

Short List
TitleMCDELIVERY X GRABFOOD LAUNCH
BrandMCDONALD'S SINGAPORE
Product / ServiceMCDELIVERY
CategoryC02. Use of Real-time Data
EntrantHANBAOBAO PTE. LTD. Singapore, SINGAPORE
Idea Creation OMD SINGAPORE, SINGAPORE
Media Placement OMD SINGAPORE, SINGAPORE

Credits

Name Company Position
Chris Chiu DDB Group Singapore Group Chief Creative Officer

Why is this work relevant for Media?

How do we deliver continued business growth for a firmly established market leader like McDonald’s through the smart use of media, proprietary technology and real-time data? With this campaign, we uncovered a new way for the brand to enhance its food-delivery sales via both its owned channel (McDelivery) and a growing food aggregator (GrabFood), leveraging real-time data signals and the intelligent deployment of automation in bidding systems that changed dynamically based on McDelivery’s rider capacity - thereby delivering incremental business growth for McDonald’s. This case study tells you how we did it.

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/insights (30% of vote)

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 (20% of vote)

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 (20% of vote)

To overcome the low awareness of the GrabFood service and capitalise on the Grab ride-hailing app customer base, McDonald’s took over the Grab app for 2 weeks, transforming its vehicle icons into McDonald’s colours. We also leveraged Waze (a leading navigation app for drivers in Singapore) to target users who were searching for McDonald’s restaurants on the app, transforming the Waze in-app icons to green McDonald’s Fries (GrabFood’s brand colour). Then, 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! On display advertising and social media, we 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, to leverage GrabFood as an extension of McDonald's McDelivery service!

List the results (30% of vote)

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

Describe the use of data, or how the data enhanced the campaign output

Using proprietary award-winning technology, we effectively optimised sales for McDonald’s in high-consumer-demand/low-operational-capacity neighbourhoods by mapping the brand’s delivery hubs’ data on Search Marketing Platforms. With a customised script, which optimised ad messaging and landing page, we were able to dynamically drive and capture orders, regardless of McDonald’s real-time delivery capacity. When McDelivery could fulfil the order in a reasonable time, we took the orders via McDelivery; when it couldn’t, we drove them to GrabFood, ensuring that nobody was left without their favourite McDonald’s meal! On display advertising & social media, we geo-fenced historical high-consumer-demand/low-operational-capacity neighbourhoods and upweighted campaign messaging in these areas to drive incremental sales via GrabFood. All this was done in real-time and dynamically, so that we could reduce the amount of media wastage (in areas where McDelivery couldn’t deliver) while improving our overall yield and incremental reach through GrabFood’s delivery channel.

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