2023 Bronze Customer Journey

Agency: Armadillo

Client: McDonald’s

Entry Title: Monopoly: Play and Stay

Executive Summary

The annual McDonald’s Monopoly promotion drives a spike in customer engagement. But hundreds of thousands of customers don’t repeat after their first online play. The fast-food giant’s loyalty scheme was key.

Strategy

MyMcDonald’s Rewards thanks customers all year round. Early adopters had already shown a lift in their value—creating an exciting opportunity for Monopoly: leverage the usual excitement while using it to recruit more members into Rewards, and nudge people to keep playing.

The three-pillar strategy, executed through email and push, comprised:

• Double peels in the app to incentivise downloads.
• A vibrant campaign from launch through to the last-chance-to-play message with a live API feed showing how many prizes were still up for grabs.
• Free game code and food offers to incentivise non-members.

Creativity

The challenge was to take the well-loved, iconic Monopoly branding and the MyMcDonald’s Rewards identity, and create a campaign style that allowed both to work impactfully together, but in a way that made sense to the customer.

The result was a bright, bold campaign that was hard to ignore. Each communication invited the individual customer to take a specific action, made unmissable with golden CTAs.

Players were served chances to interact at every touchpoint. Letters peeled back and prizes burst out of emails before the customer’s eyes. Tap-to-slide panels revealed how to play information in the same way it might on-pack. Animated panels drew attention to compelling calls to action. And a live API feed showed in real-time how many prizes were still to play for.

Results

Incremental results were accurately measured using no-mail control groups, created for each targeting segment. The campaign was directly responsible for a 10% increase in overall customers playing the game at McDonald’s, and an 8% increase in total plays.

An incremental 172k customers downloaded the app: 16% above control. Crucially, the campaign delivered 260k incremental MyMcDonald’s Rewards sign-ups, 34% above control. In the year since the promotion, customers spent an average £105.05 on the app, totalling £27.3m.

More customers and more game play translated directly to commercial results. The campaign overall drove 2.2 million incremental app orders during the promotion, with the resulting incremental revenue delivering 48:1 ROI.

The Team

Armadillo - Becky Howell, Senior Account Director - Will Barnes, Lead Digital Art Director - Charlie Bulmer, Senior Conceptual Copywriter - Steve Brailey, Lead Developer - Steph Dearing, Developer - Luke Collins, Senior CRM Planner - Amy Hurd, Lead Campaign Manager - Teri-Ann Burroughs, Senior Campaign Manager - Alex Mills, Campaign Manager - Pradeep Aggarwal, Senior Insight Analyst - Rob Pellow, Executive Technical Director - Hannah Waters, Executive Creative Director - Jo Penn, Managing Director