McDonald's Surprise Alarm
McDonald's Regional APAC
McDonald's tasked us to help them build stronger associations with mornings. But we very well know that not everyone likes mornings.
So by creating the same anticipation of waking up to a special occassion, like a child on Christmas morning, we were able to give mornings a fresh start.
We introduced a new marketing tool by repurposing the utility of an alarm clock and created the McDonald's Surprise Alarm app. McDonald's Surprise Alarm works like any other alarm but with the added twist of having people wake up to happy surprises. These surprises come in the likes of food coupons, music downloads, life hacks, tips and fun content in varied formats of mobile wallpapers, gifs, and videos. Users could even wake up to a cash prize of $1,000. I'm pretty sure that got some people leaping out of their beds.
Within its first 2 weeks of launch, the app achieved the no.1 spot on both the App Store and Google Play Store.
Such a feat for McDonald's and the team of course.
An overview of the app's UX/UI and the content pieces that went into the app.
The many different states (alarm view, redemption view and thumbnail (wallet) view of the food coupons within the app.
On top of food coupons, fun content pieces were also pushed out as surprises to the users. We had to ensure variety through volume which had us find nimble and cost efficient solutions to create them. The production of the first 700 pieces (for two markets; Singapore and Taiwan had adaptations for two languages across multiple screen sizes of both Android phones and iPhones) was a real (and sometimes confusing) challenge.
Here's an example of a surprise content piece in the format of a gif. Rise with Fries aims to wake users up with motivational morning messages which creatively uses fries in stop motion execution.
Eggs-traordinary mornings, a content piece in the format of a video uses egg characters to tell the message of how the day could possibly turn out for its recepient. Almost like a fortune cookie of sorts.
Global McDonald's presentation at Twitter's First Annual conference for Mobile Developers featured the McDonald's Surprise Alarm app: https://twitter.com/Flight/status/524985800174223361
Credits
Creative Director: Vinod Savio
Associate Creative Director: Lydia Lim
Art Direction:Loo Yong Ping, Ong Seow Fen, Ng Xue Wen, Sylvester Poh, Lydia Lim
Copywriting: Kevin Poh, Shervin Seah, Chen Shanghao
UX: Yishu See
UI: Loo Yong Ping, Lydia Lim
Project Management: Antonio Valentino
Tech development: The Marketing Store
Account Management: Stuart Nyman
Video/GIF Content production: Feely Films
Case Study Video production: Freeflow Production, Reeve Koh
The McDonald's Morning Surprise Alarm app recently picked up a Gold for Best Use of Brand Advocacy at The Marketing Loyalty & Engagement Awards 2014 in Singapore.
It also won The Best of Global Digital Marketing Monthly Awards in September 2014.
