McDonald's Saver Menu

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Operating in the Quick Service Restaurant (QSR) industry, McDonald’s is in a fiercely competitive environment

The explosion of fast delivery services and a decrease in high street footfall, means that growing incremental visits and converting occasional McDonald’s visitors to regular diners, is becoming harder. The key aim for McDonald’s was to increase incremental visits to restaurants despite this challenging environment. However, simply marketing at scale to a demographically defined mass audience, no longer has the power it once did. With econometrics showing a tangible decrease in return for the business and consequently placing OOH spend in jeopardy, there was a clear need to review panel level selection at scale. We knew we needed to capitalise on audience data and technological advances to increase our on-target audience delivery in the moments that matter.

We know that better targeted advertising delivers better outcomes and wanted to amplify this approach for McDonald’s. We felt that the places people visit regularly and recently, could tell us more about their habits and behaviours than demographics alone and that if we could understand people’s location behaviours, we could better predict how to reach them in the future.

Our strategy was to capitalise on combining clearly defined sweet spot audiences with OOH’s core strength of delivering large scale reach. Mobile data and intelligence to identify regular QSR visitors and analyse their everyday journeys, and then buy OOH ads they were most likely to see would be key.

Using Talon’s out-of-home data management platform, Ada, we were able to plan and measure in a way that wasn’t previously possible. Ada manages and activates audience and location data from multiple sources - including mobile location histories, Points of Interest (POIs) and 100% of UK OOH inventory. Data science models apply analysis to these datasets, generating insights about people’s real and recent behaviours, such as the places they visit, and the OOH advertising inventory they are most likely to see on their everyday journeys.

OMD undertook campaign audience discovery work to allow us to move away from purely demographic targeting and define a key sweet spot audience of ‘Value Seekers’. Collaborating with McDonald’s, Talon where then able to leverage insights from their data management platform to create custom audience segments of QSR visitors and ‘Value Seekers’ for a campaign promoting their Saver Menu, McDonald’s range of low-cost menu items. These audience segments included people who had recently visited McDonald’s or a competitor, and people who regularly visit affordable high street retailers. By analysing the location histories of these audiences, we generated predictions on future behaviours and which OOH inventory they are most likely to see.

Using Ada, we learned that approximately 15% of the total audience delivered by the average OOH ad unit is either a QSR visitor or Value Seeker, and that there were huge differences in audience profile of each unit. By optimising 40% of our national OOH buy, we achieved a x2.5 improvement targeting vs. previous campaigns.

To measure the impact on incremental visits, independent research provider, OnDevice, were appointed to quantify the impact of the campaign on in-store visits. The results beat all predictions. Compared to an identical but traditionally-planned OOH campaign just a few weeks earlier, with the same media investment, weights, formats and creative, the Ada-powered OOH delivered x4.5 more incremental visits to McDonald’s restaurants. Versus the expected levels of visits, this equated to 700,000 additional visits from both new and infrequent customers per week over the campaign period. Our approach using Ada continues to play a pivotal role in refining our OOH strategy for McDonald’s.