Content Champions: Hanbaobao McDonald's

Hanbaobao is the franchise holder of McDonald’s Singapore which opened its first outlet at Liat Towers on Orchard Road in 1979. Today, it has over 135 McDonald’s restaurants island-wide serving millions of customers every month.

McDonald's Singapore was crowned the “Marketer of the Year” at Singapore’s 12th edition of the Marketing Excellence Awards. The team secured four gold, five silver and one bronze awards across numerous categories.

Content Champions is a segment during MARKETING-INTERACTIVE's Content360 conference in Singapore in which we highlight brands who have made significant impact in the content marketing space through their campaigns. This campaign was first shortlisted for Marketing Excellence Awards 2023 and was further evaluated by the editorial team at MARKETING-INTERACTIVE to make the shortlist. 

Campaign: Scream for Ice Cream and Close Friends List
Brand: McDonald's Singapore

Challenge

While McDonald's is a well-known brand, it frequently has limited-edition product launches or brings back fan favorites and need to drum up excitement for it. 

Strategy

To do so, McDonald's worked with influencers and often employed campaigns which were out of the box. At MARKETING-INTERACTIVE's Content360 conference, Eugene Lee, CMO of McDonald's IDL segment shared that the company often looks for ideas rooted in culture to resonate with its audience.

Execution

In its first campaign, McDonald’s Singapore saw the launch of an interactive digital board at Funan Mall. The campaign saw consumers screaming at the top of their lungs to get a free Hershey’s ice cream cone.

The digital board utilised sound technology to react to the decibels in a scream, turning a plain vanilla cone into a Hershey’s chocolate one. The free ice cream activation ran from August 29th to August 31st at Funan Mall in Singapore and provided 1200 free ice creams to literal screaming fans.

The second campaign chosen for its creativity saw McDonald's Singapore launch a close friends list of influencers to announce the return of its well-loved McGriddles sandwiches. 

Rumors began floating on social media last night that some had been added to McDonald's close friends list when influencer Darshen took to TikTok to share a screengrab of his addition.

"I'm not delulu right? Or is it an intern's mistake?" asked Darshen in the video.  He then clicks into the story which has a post by McDonald's saying, "No, you're not seeing things. Welcome to McGriddles close friends list."

"Do you think I'm delulu or am I besties with McDonald's now?" asks Darshen. Other influencers such as Kai and Vanessa Chia, also took to TikTok to share that they had been included in the exclusive list. 

Check out the other winners here.