By the end of 2019, McDonald’s was not capturing their fair share of the Hispanic market, with the biggest losses among those under 24. The brand was becoming irrelevant with Latino youth.

However, we uncovered that Latino Youth, and Hispanics in general, were turning to Latin Music more than ever to stay connected during the pandemic year, according to data from Pandora. Music was the perfect vehicle to share a meaningful message.

This inspired us and our partner McDonald’s to enlist global music sensation, J Balvin. He was briefed to write an original track for the brand that would celebrate Latino optimism and get young Latinos excited about McDonald's again. Our objectives were to obtain as many views of the video as possible while making it available on the McDonald's app, driving sales and app downloads for the brand.

A musical love letter from McDonald’s to Latino Youth, specifically an original music video by J Balvin, which positioned McDonald’s as the brand that celebrates Latino optimism and culture. We gave J Balvin the idea of him representing different Latinos by playing ALL the roles in the video in his own unique style, which he loved and ran with.

The fact that young Latinos were leaning on the optimism of their culture in a time of uncertainty, aligned well with McDonald’s optimistic brand positioning: “making feel-good moments easy for everyone.” Our strategy was to develop a cultural moment big enough to get young Latinos talking about McDonald’s in a new light, in a way that was timely and culturally relevant.

We started the Dorado journey by teasing fans on Twitter of a possible music collaboration happening between J Balvin and McDonald’s. While the world was trying to figure out what was coming, we made sure his biggest fans had the inside scoop. When it was time for the world premiere, we did it during the Latin Grammys, a night when all eyes were on J Balvin, and turned everyone’s attention to the McDonald’s app, the only place to see the video.

Although the music video ran only twice on broadcast during the Latin Grammys, pre-show support from the TV network, Univision, amplified the idea, while news outlets across the country picked up the story. After the initial launch of the video on the app, we posted the video on both the McDonald’s and J Balvin YouTube channels to expand our reach.

1. Garnering over 12MM views, Dorado earned 35x more views than

average on the Mcdonald’s YouTube channel and ranked as a top 10 video.

2. Of the 133k visitors who engaged with the Dorado video on the McDonald’s app, 70% went on to place an order.

3. Over only 7 days, the campaign drove 1700 incremental app downloads (above and beyond the expected) among this specific Hispanic target.

4.Over 7.7M impressions were generated across social media efforts; this is more than 13x the 2019 McDonald’s Latin Grammy impression benchmark

(558,665 impressions.)