Iconic status / This isn’t the first time that McDonald’s has played with emojis. In 2015, in Germany, its Everyday Icon campaign laid claim to the burger, fries and soft drink emoji in a series of ads blurring real life objects with their counterparts. Frequently Used Promo continues this thought, seizing on the striking association with the fries emoji and reasserting its iconic status in the process.
Byron Sharp writes about the importance of having such distinctive assets in How Brands Grow with regards to mental availability: ‘The more extensive and fresher the network of memory associations about a brand, the greater the brand’s chance of being thought of in the variety of buying situations experienced by customers,’ he writes. Here, McDonald’s refreshes its connection with the fries emoji, ensuring that when people see fries, they think McDonald’s.
Choose your weapon / This is an example of a brand weaponising its audience, in short ‘activating a target buyer's network of friends, family and the public to achieve a business objective normally undertaken by the brand’. The mechanic rewarded people for having the fries emoji on their Frequently Used List, but to get that status they had to share an image of something that looked like McDonald’s fries with their phone contacts, effectively doing McDonald’s marketing for them.
Using what’s to hand / McDonald’s harnessed the fries emoji that already existed on people’s phones and laid claim to it as its own. Speaking to Contagious, Cristhian Fuentes, general manager at Orson, said: ‘We tried to keep the execution as simple as possible, and I think that’s the magic of the idea. It was literally on everyone’s hand. The campaign objective was to create compelling storytelling to strengthening the brand’s iconic status. This is an idea that ran in Costa Rica but works perfectly in every market around the world.’
