We showed the TIFF audience McCafé shares their appreciation of film by creating parodies of critically acclaimed movies starring coffee beans: Lawrence of Arabica (Lawrence of Arabia), Beanheart (Braveheart, The Grinding (The Shining), The Good The Bad & The Brewed (The Good, The Bad & The Ugly), and Donnie Darkroast (Donnie Darko).

During the 10-day festival, the videos were promoted on social media (targeting the Greater Toronto Area), and through shazamable coffee sleeves handed out to the long lines of festivalgoers. Once the sleeves were scanned with the Shazam app’s visual feature, the viewer was brought to mccafecinema.com to watch all the film spoofs.

The online videos reached well past the festival with 453,683 completed views. Organic reach on Twitter alone reached 2.2 million people. The campaign set a new record for McDonald’s Canada, with 99.2% of consumer reactions on social media being positive. But most impressive was a positive tweet from the writer/director of Donnie Darko himself “Loving this @McD_Canada DONNIE DARKROAST commercial.”