Mcdonald’s gets foreign aid for ads
The fast-food giant’s agency hires the creator of successful British commercials.
CHICAGO — In 2008, British adman Tony Malcolm sat down in a London McDonald’s and watched the customers come and go.
“You don’t have a reservation to go to McDonald’s,” Malcolm recalled. “There’s no airs and graces; there’s no knives and forks. A lot of the time you go in there when you’re just passing by.”
From that observation came a pithy and poetic, award-winning British TV commercial that cataloged the different types of folks who visit McDonald’s. Sample lines:
Now the laborers and cablers and council-motion tablers were just passing by.
And the Gothy types and scoffy types and like their coffee frothy types were just passing by.
Those on their own whilst on the phone, dunking McNuggets and having a moan, were just passing by.
The ad, which drove sales higher, had a very British sensibility, but there was something universal about the sentiment. Not coincidentally, Malcolm isn’t creating ads for McDonald’s in Britain anymore.
He’s now ensconced in an office in Chicago’s Aon Center, where he is the new executive creative director at ad agency DDB Chicago in charge of the U.S. McDonald’s account.
It’s a challenging time to be selling hamburgers for the Oak Brook, Ill., fast-food giant and its longtime advertising agency. Both will be looking to Malcolm to lead the charge.
“There’s nothing to fix,” Malcolm said. “It’s just that we need to face forward and go into the future with even more innovative ways of hitting the audiences and selling the products.”
After nearly a decade of robust growth, McDonald’s has seen flat same-store sales over the last two years in the U.S. Analysts point to increased competition, the slow economic recovery and problems with new product rollouts, such as last fall’s Mighty Wings, which reportedly left the chain sitting on millions of pounds of frozen chicken wings.
“Some of their issues have been self-inflicted,” said R.J. Hottovy, a senior restaurant analyst with Morningstar in Chicago. “They struggled the last two years maintaining both innovation and the timing of a lot of their new products.”
Fine-tuning the product innovation pipeline should help. But marketing also will play a key role in getting more customers to frequent the chain this year, just as it did when DDB first partnered with McDonald’s more than four decades ago.
In 1971, DDB predecessor Needham, Harper & Steers created the iconic “You Deserve a Break Today” campaign, helping to propel the fast-food chain to countless billions of hamburgers sold and global ubiquity.
Chicago-based Leo Burnett won the McDonald’s business in 1981, but thenDDB Chairman Keith Reinhard kept pitching. The agency won back a small portion of the business in 1990, and in 1997 it was named lead agency again for McDonald’s. It remains DDB’s largest account and the agency’s lifeblood.
“It is literally the DNA of this agency,” said Paul Gun- ning, 44, chief executive of DDB Chicago. “It’s a little cliched, but ketchup in the veins is about as true as you can get at DDB Chicago. McDonald’s runs through this agency in heritage, DNA and culture.”
A 30-year veteran of the British advertising scene, Malcolm has held creative positions with agencies such as Saatchi & Saatchi and Wieden + Kennedy, and also headed his own firm, Malcolm Moore. He has spent the last nine years at Leo Burnett London, where he was an award-winning creative director on the McDonald’s account.
Malcolm was recruited by Gunning, and the decision to relocate to Chicago was all about McDonald’s.
“This is the epicenter of everything McDonald’s, and I really felt that to push my ambition, and to help with Paul and everybody else at the agency, this is the place I wanted to be,” Malcolm said. “So I came over the Atlantic to the worst weather I’ve ever seen in my life and it hasn’t put me off.”
McDonald’s spent $960 million to advertise on measured media in the U.S. in 2012, a pace it maintained through the first three quarters of 2013, according to Kantar Media.
The success of Malcolm’s “Just Passing By” campaign, which won a 2011 Cannes Gold Lion for creative effectiveness, will certainly inform his work going forward. Its mission was to reignite passion for McDonald’s while selling its diverse menu to an even more diverse clientele that changes dramatically during the day.
“That’s quite a task to do in one 60-second ad — trying to represent the whole democracy of McDonald’s and how it connects with its audience,” Malcolm said. “I think that really succeeded, and it did drive sales as well. I feel it’s the same here as it is in the U.K.”