For years McDonald’s had been communicating to their audience via broad mass media. Stagnating ROI and drop in sales uplift as a result of the target groups’ change in media consumption patterns inspired change. The brief from McDonald’s was to find new ways of reaching their target audience on digital media with the strategic objective of step-changing the marketing performance and to ensure future growth. We needed to understand the consumers’ media consumption better, and at a more granular level, so that we would be able to act upon it in real time through Programmatic. McDonald’s had a segment study conducted, enriched with media habits, socio demographics, interests and what the different segments were not interested in.

Our new approach have generated significant value to McDonald’s. Not only on a media ROI level, but at a core business level as well, positively affecting sales and the ‘cost per guest count’:

The overall digital ROI has increased from 2.6 to 5.8 – performing better than TV! The best performing programmatic activities have an ROI above 10.

Programmatic Buying has the lowest cost amongst all media groups for bringing a guest into the physical restaurants – and at an index 17 compared to traditional digital display buying – so more than five times better than traditional display advertising.

Through the use of data, the sales lift from Digital activities has tripled from 2013 to 2014 and digital is now generating close to 20% of the total media driven sales.

Moreover, this approach and use of technology have become best practice globally within McDonald’s and is currently being implemented across markets.

When serving a banner for a client who opted in, or via our data partnerships, our Data Management Platform (DMP) grabs two types of information: cookie ID of the device we served an ad on and the URL where the ad was served. Our DMP then crawl the URL, scanning it for unique keywords and phrases, identifying what makes this page unique. All findings are tied together into our world model, a semantic model displaying what the Danish population is consuming in terms of specific words and phrases from articles, blogs, commercial and non-commercial sites, within the last 30 days. The findings are also tied to the specific users’ profile. So each ad impression tell us something about that specific user and the Danish population as a whole.

We then take the insights from the McDonald’s segment study and use them to identify users belonging to a given segment. The Immortals for instance, they are tech oriented, so we identify users where tech terms and phrases are over-represented compared to the world model. We also know that they are predominantly male singles. From our socio demographic segments in the DMP, we know how to identify these users as well as we know what makes them different from the rest of the population. The system looks at all the cookies that fulfill the constraints set forth, i.e. consuming tech, interested in gaming and other things that characterize the segment and identify what makes them unique as a segment, creating a positive sample of an Immortal.

We then compare the rest of the population to that positive sample and identify the users/cookies that correspond enough to the positive sample to be included in the segment, and through our DMP/DSP integrations, we are now able to buy those segments programmatically.

Being able to target the desired target group in such a precise manner gives the creative agency the chance to create messages and product offers with a better fit to that specific target group. So the data doesn’t just minimize budget waste on people not belonging to the desired target group, it also means that the creative agency doesn’t have to take into account, that the messaging is also displayed to people outside the given segment. So the level of precision targeting means that the creative agency can create day parted messaging for each segment e.g. targeting Joe, the Immortal, creating a McMuffin message for morning hours, Cheese burger for lunch time, McFlurry as the tempting afternoon snack and a Big Mac meal for dinner time. So in essence our targeting technology enables us to fulfill the marketing dream of the right audience with the right message at the right time.