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McDonald's Flexes Pop Culture Muscle with 'As Featured In' Push  

As fast food brands go, McDonald’s has long held a prominent place in films, TV shows and songs. The company’s new “As Featured In” campaign looks to capitalize on that pop cultural cachet.

mcdonald 998495 640smallAs Creative Bloq reports, the marketing push blankets 100 markets with the notion that “everyone has a McDonald’s order, even in the fictional world.” The brand rolled out a series of “trailers” and “teasers” for a “movie” introducing its limited-time “As Featured In” meal.

The campaign touches on George Costanza giving his date a Big Mac on Seinfeld and Michael Scott cherishing his Filet-O-Fish on The Office. Movies are featured too, including Coming to America, Fast and Furious and Space Jam. Music isn’t left out either, stretching back to Run DMC’s “You Be Illin’” with its jingle-worthy line, “He gave a quarter and his order, small fries, Big Mac!”

The “As Featured In” meal itself allows diners to pick between a Big Mac, a Quarter Pounder With Cheese or a 10-piece Chicken McNuggets, plus medium fries. The idea is that all of these choices have been in movies or shows. A sweet and sour sauce tied to the Disney+ series Loki is also part of the action.

As Insider notes, the “As Featured In” meal builds on the chain’s successful “Famous Order” series of meals based on the favorite orders of Travis Scott, Cardi B, Saweetie and other celebrities. “The As Featured In Meal is our biggest Famous Order yet, celebrating the most memorable McDonald’s references across the world of entertainment," Morgan Flatley, global chief marketing officer at McDonald’s, said in a statement.

As part of the campaign, McDonald’s is decking out a Brooklyn location to match the 1982 setting of Loki Season 2. The initiative is part of a broader bid for nostalgia by the company, which revived its Grimace character earlier this year with a popular purple shake.

As Meat + Poultry reports, executives credited the return of the fuzzy purple mascot with helping drive double-digit growth in comparable-store sales for the most recent quarter. Ian F. Borden, global chief financial officer, said of the Grimace activation during a July earnings call, “It quickly became one of our most socially engaging campaigns of all time with millions of reactions on our social media posts, a true demonstration of how the power of our brand emerges in organic and creative ways in our fans.”

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