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McDonald's launches campaign with Mariah Carey, promotes another chief marketer (Score 78)

To promote its holiday meal giveaway, Wieden + Kennedy, developed the new campaign.

Ever since it debuted the "Famous Orders" series featuring meals enjoyed by pop culture stars such as Saweetie, BTS and Travis Scott, McDonald's has experienced strengthened sales and brand image. Company leaders hope the Mariah Meal will further bolster these things during the winter holiday season. Since these influencer partnerships have had such high ROI, I expect McDonald's will seek additional ones throughout the coming year.

This announcement closely follows the company's appointment of chief marketing and digital customer experience officer Tariq Hassan earlier this year. Since then, McDonald's has promoted another top marketer: global CMO Morgan Flatley. In 2017, Flatley joined the company in what's now Hassan's role. Effective November 2021, though, she is McDonald's global CMO.

So far this year, iSpot reports McDonald's has spent approximately $182m on national TV commercials, down 12% form the approximately $205.8m it spent within the same 2020 timeframe. The fast food chain ended up spending approximately $283m in 2020, down 10% from the approximately $313.3m it spent in 2019. McDonald's 20221 commercials have targeted male consumers watching shows such as NFL Football, NBA Basketball, Good Morning America, College Football and SpongeBob SquarePants.

Per Pathmatics, the company has allocated roughly $106.6m toward digital ads YTD, up 62% from the roughly $65.7m it had allocated by this point last year. Last year's estimated full-year spend jumped 40% to $80.9m from that of $57.5m in 2019. Since the beginning of 2021, the company has earned around 10.6b digital impressions via Facebook (39%), desktop video (30%), Instagram (19%), Twitter (4%), desktop display (4%), mobile video (2%) and mobile display (2%) ads. Most of this year's desktop video ads have been placed site direct onto destinations such as youtube.com (80%), hulu.com (7%) and twitch.tv (4%).

Additionally, according to Magellan, McDonald's has aired almost 5k podcast ads within the past 12 months.

Right now, the company is primarily targeting Gen-Z men via paid social, YouTube, OTT, Twitch and podcast ads. Kantar data shows McDonald's also invests in radio, OOH, print and local broadcast. Sellers able to offer relevant ad space should contact to do so.

Agency & martech readers - As I briefly mentioned, W+K was the main agency behind this new campaign. However, other agencies that worked on the holiday initiative include Canvas Worldwide split Hispanic media communications duties.