McDonald's Restaurants of Canada
McDonald's Monopoly Coast to Coast

The Goal

Increase winner believability for McDonald’ Monopoly Coast to Coast.

The Target

All McDonald’s-loving Canadians

Insights and Strategy

Monopoly Coast to Coast is consistently McDonald’s most impactful program each year, driving the highest sales lift of any single program on the calendar. Despite this continued success, the program struggles with winner believability. Research has shown that although the one in five odds are in line with competitors’ contests, there is a prevailing belief that the larger, collect-to-win prizes are impossible to actually win. This perception creates an issue for McDonald’s because credibility influences motivation to play, which in turn impacts sales and guest counts.

What inspires people to play Monopoly Coast to Coast is the prospect of winning prizes; sales will be negatively impacted if the brand isn’t delivering on believability of the program. To combat this, the agency worked with McDonald’s to integrate actual winners directly into its advertising in real-time, which was refreshed on a daily basis.

Last year’s program leveraged Facebook to feature the biggest winners of the previous day, geo-targeted on a provincial level. This approach improved winner believability scores. Because the program is so broad from a target perspective and winners can vary so wildly on a day to day basis, this approach did not guarantee that individuals would see a prize that genuinely interested them.

In order to motivate this expansive target and create a strong value proposition for such a diverse group the brand needed to feature prizes that were most relevant to each of them, while continuing to include actual winners to reinforce believability.

The Plan

The brand’s campaign had three overarching objectives, firstly to announce that Monopoly Coast to Coast is back, secondly to communicate the one in five odds of winning a prize and thirdly to increase winner believability. The program ran for 5 weeks, and had a weeklong pre-promotion period prior to the game starting.

The brand’s traditional media buy consisted of television, radio, and out of home, which delivered on mass awareness of the program as well as reinforcing the program odds.

In order to impact its winner believability scores in the biggest way, the brand knew it needed to show people the prizes that appealed to them the most. To do that, the brand needed data. To use this data, the agency shifted the media mix to be digitally-centric for the first time in the game’s history. Working with behavioural data, the team was able to segment the brand’s target based on affinities to specific types of prizing. This new approach required a new platform, as it couldn’t deliver on this through Facebook alone.

In order to action on the prize profiles created, the team leveraged Google’s Vogon technology on YouTube.

Each user was segmented based on their likely affinities to certain prizing. During the pre-promotion period, each user was served a bumper ad on YouTube that featured a prize relevant to their interests. After each prize was awarded, the message was then dynamically updated with the respective winner’s name.

Working with Nielsen, the agency tracked ad recall, recognition of the advertiser, and persuasion (likelihood to visit McDonald’s) on YouTube and all other platforms it used for the campaign. McDonald’s measured success of the program based on the uptick of winner believability.

The Results

Shifting the focus from social to YouTube to highlight real-time winners resulted in twice as many players saying that they believed they were “very likely to win” versus the previous year. YouTube drove the highest recall (35%), recognition (31%) and persuasion (20%) of any single tactic in the campaign, including TV. The 2017 edition of McDonald’s Monopoly Coast to Coast was the most successful iteration of the program to date, driving the highest guest counts, sales lift, cash flow, and advertising ROI in the game’s history. Based on the success of this year’s campaign, the agency’s data-driven strategy, led by the new segmentation framework, will be the new foundation for Monopoly campaigns moving forward.