This creative has spent his career on McDonald’s - here’s how he’s keeping it fresh

Luis Miguel Messianu has spent much of his career working on the McDonald’s brand. In fact, he’s so familiar that bosses tried to woo him to a CMO role. Instead, he’s joined DDB Worldwide as global chief creative officer for the fast food chain. He tells us how he, and the agency, is evolving to meet its longstanding client’s needs.It’s a longstanding quirk that one of the world’s most ubiquitous brands hosts such variety beneath its golden arches, from the McShrimp found in German branches to the Maharaja Mac available to Indian customers (and to the full set of samurai armor set before the till of my hometown’s own branch).The company’s brand is a big tent. And it’s a big task for the agencies working with McDonald’s – DDB, Leo Burnett and TBWA – to communicate with consistency while helping to move this advertising juggernaut forward.Luis Miguel Messianu, DDB Worldwide’s new global chief creative officer for McDonald’s, has had plenty of time to get to grips with the brief, though – 27 years to be precise. ”It’s the brand I’ve worked the longest on in my career, but I still find it the most challenging, the most intriguing and the most changeable,” he tells The Drum.Inflatable RonaldMessianu has had McDonald’s as a client for the majority of his long career, beginning back in Mexico in 1985 when he was part of a team that beat DDB to the honor of launching the fast food chain in the country. ”I was a young whippersnapper and I had just joined McCann Erickson in Mexico.”He recalls that he used ”creativity and innocence” to persuade a friend working at a local out-of-home firm to let the agency emblazon the legend ”McDonald’s and McCann, the ’Big Mac’ combination” across the street from its offices. ”When the global team came to the office, they were taken aback and that was the beginning of my love affair with the brand.”McDonald’s arrival in Mexico City made the front pages of local newspapers and provoked lines around the block. ”People were standing in line for hours and hours for the opening while I was on the roof of the store helping the team place a giant inflatable Ronald.”I thought it was so exciting and new. It brings a smile to my face, just thinking of how crazy we were to do what we did and to launch such an American brand in Mexico. It became almost like a passport to the United States. People felt like they were visiting the US through the magic of the McDonald’s brand.”As well as joining DDB, Messianu plans to still spend half his time at Alma, the agency he founded (itself a longstanding partner of McDonald’s), but sees his new role is a chance for his ”two lieutenants”, Isaac Mizhrahi and Alvar Suñol, to lead the company as co-presidents. ”This is an opportunity for them to step up.”McDonald’s has also been part of much of the working life of his new colleague, the DDB global business lead Dave Kissel. His career kicked off in 1985 (the same year Messianu was helping to open the McDonald’s Mexico City outpost) as an associate media director at DDB Needham, working on clients such as Sears, Clorox and – you guessed it – McDonald’s.”When you’re working on one of the greatest brands in the world, it doesn’t take a lot to get up in the morning and do great things,” says Kissel. ”You have to bring your best game on this business. And I truly believe that the best people at DDB are working on McDonald’s.”A fondness for McDonald’s is prerequisite for employment at DDB, which has serviced the client for 51 years. Messianu holds a candle for the Big Mac Bacon while Kissel opts for the classic Quarter Pounder with Cheese (all the better for eating while driving, he notes).Both have flirted with crossing the aisle and working for the brand directly. Messianu shares that he was briefly courted for the CMO position after the departure of chief creative officer Roy Bergold: ”I was very flattered. I got the call from human resources and I was very honest, that I was starting to build Alma – and plus, I told them, I’m a tropical bird. I wouldn’t be able to live in Chicago. I’m much happier living in Miami.”Kissel, meanwhile, recalls: ”A couple times conversations have gotten pretty serious and pretty close. There was one time where there was an offer and I thought about it a lot, but decided not to do it. I told McDonald’s that I think I can do more for the brand where I am at DDB.”Think local, market globalIn Kissel’s telling, the agency mirrors its client with a decentralized ”federalist” approach to business and territory. ”The DDB way is a local way. It’s local-up – and that’s McDonald’s. Its market works from the local market up.”But that approach, which has provided both companies with flexibility and scale over the decades, is coming under more pressure than ever before. Morgan Flatley, McDonald’s newly installed global chief marketing officer, leans towards a more centralized approach – and DDB Chicago’s brief will gradually begin to reflect that change.”There are things that we should share,” says Kissel. ”The overall positioning of the brand, the values that the brand shares about diversity, about inclusion, about doing the right thing, about feeding and fostering communities. Those things are non-negotiable.”He says the need to provide a degree more control for its client was one of the factors behind Messianu’s appointment. ”The time is right to move from simply having great local market creativity to having somebody actually sit and stand at the center, able to establish a creative point of view for DDB and McDonald’s, upholding standards of creativity and pushing people to be creatively brave.”In recent years, Kissel says, McDonald’s has left the business of headline-grabbing creative to its competitors and chosen to focus on alternate forms of promotion, such as its Travis Scott meal tie-in. And though the agency has won plenty of awards with the client in recent years, he wants to restore its reputation as a quality advertiser: ”It is one of the top spenders in the world on advertising... but it knows that today, you can’t just buy your way to attention. It’s not enough to be the biggest spender in the category, you’ve actually got to break through into culture. You’ve got to own news cycles, you’ve got to get people talking about your brand.”Cultural relevance is key to reaching the disparate communities that make up McDonald’s wider US target audience, including Spanish speakers. Previously, Messianu notes, efforts to catch Hispanic consumers would have involved mere translation of existing marketing. ”Now, language has become less important. It’s not the core of the communication: culture has become the most important way to connect.”Furthermore, the brand has begun to stand out in the market for more than just price or product. The pandemic saw it massively ramp up its takeaway and remote service options; sales increased 20% worldwide last year. As its business model has changed, so too has its expectations of agencies. DDB, which handles CRM for McDonald’s in 17 markets already, is well placed to make itself useful.Kissel says the brand tends to prioritize ’creative effectiveness’ over excellence and that its responses to recent market trends will reinforce that mode of thinking. ”I would expect that personalized marketing, performance-driven marketing to take a greater role. That doesn’t mean that McDonald’s isn’t going to be the great mass market. An important part of its formula is broad appeal, using emotion. That’s always going to continue to be a part of what it does. But it is well positioned to be even more sophisticated about the performance side of marketing.”Messianu has only just begun working in his new role, but he and Kissel point to work produced for Scandinavian markets by Nord DDB as one potential direction. Recent campaigns there dared to highlight the problems created by McDonald’s own packaging and the youth of its workforce (facts previously avoided by the brand) as triggers for new, eye-catching campaigns.Meanwhile, DDB Paris has been pushing McDonald’s into the metaverse with its first NFT and DDB Chicago is working on a campaign to drive youth employment with the company via TikTok. ”Brands like McDonald’s, if they stick to their essence, they come across as genuine no matter where you put them,” says Messianu.The trick will be to bring that innovation back to the US and apply it at a greater scale, in a way that satisfies its obsession with effectiveness.”The essence of the brand is what remains,” concludes Messianu. ”We cannot change the personality of the brand if we take it into the metaverse. If anything, we have to be truer to the brand to make that connection work. The challenge is to keep it fresh while also keeping it real and keeping it consistent.”

This creative has spent his career on McDonald’s - here’s how he’s keeping it fresh

By Sam Bradley | Senior Reporter

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