Considering the cultural development mentioned in the strategy section and the role McDonald’s has been playing, we needed an outstanding launch idea far away from any organic food cliché that would stir up the public debate. That’s why we did the unthinkable and deliberately misused the Holy Grail of German Soccer – the Allianz Arena.

For three days one million LEDs transformed the 26.000 square meter facade of the stadium into a giant organic burger, creating the largest outdoor advertising ever at one of Germany’s busiest freeway interchanges. On social media, this resulted in an immediate discussion about our organic beef burger. Then the topic picked up pace on the media – in Germany and internationally. Finally one week before the launch of the McB. everybody knew: You can now buy organic beef at McDonald’s.

The illumination of the Allianz Arena reached a tremendous amount of media coverage. In total 450,000 views were generated simply by cars passing the arena on the freeway, over 10 million people saw it on Facebook, creating over 400,000 user-interactions. Besides, the campaign led to over 20 million media impressions, resulting in an estimated earned media value of over 2.1 mio. €.

To launch McDonald's world's first organic burger far away from any organic food cliché, we turned a whole stadium into a giant burger. Apart from the stadium illumination, the campaign included a direct interaction with the fans on the McDonald's Germany Facebook profile. For every share on Facebook, the giant burger was bitten of piece by piece, giving the fans the opportunity to have a direct influence on the campaign.

Our primary target audience were young adults and young professionals (20-35 years old) with a high proclivity for organic food and an overall healthy life style. As a second target audience we identified older adults and burger lovers ranging from 35 to 49 years of age. Especially our primary target audience is getting more and more critical about the way they consume and most of all about what they consume, where it comes from and what it does to their health and body. As a result, organic food has been on the rise for several years. However, McDonald’s has always been viewed as being on the exact opposite side of this trend. Therefore we had to stay away from typical organic food clichés.

As the pioneer in the fast food world, McDonald’s launched their worlds first organic beef burger in fall 2015. As simple as it sounds, this move can be considered quite a revolution within the fast food world, making organic meat accessible for the masses. Therefore, the task was to create a launch event, which would match the revolutionary character of the product itself.