Shrimps & The Dip

Background

Every year McDonald’s has a big promotion, The Best of M-Products and in 2010 the hero product was to be McDonald’s Shrimps with Dip.

The goal: to increase sales in the promotion period against the same period a year earlier.

The problem: trying to generate interest in a promotion that has been familiar with consumers for years.

Idea

McDonald’s core target audience is becoming increasingly hard to reach through conventional media channels.

So the idea was to reach them through music. First a video clip was created of a band called Shrimps and The Dip singing “I want a shrimp from you”.

Guerilla posters and PR drove people to live gigs of the band performing and to their MySpace page, where fans could begin a relationship with the band.

The song went storming up the charts and through Shrimps and The Dip. McDonald’s was able to achieve unusual but successful cross-channel communication.

Results

Within the campaign period of only 6 weeks and the limited budget of $60,000, the song “I want a shrimp from you” was sold and downloaded 24,000 times by our target audience. This turned the song into a no. 1 top title on iTunes and musicload. The band’s MySpace profile achieved over 70,000 views, with about 2,000 visitors a day. And the sales figures for McDonald’s shrimps were 50% up from the previous year.

Our Thoughts

The role of music in marketing is becoming ever more important. This is not the first instance of a band being created for a brand, memorably in Australia where Virgin created midget rapper 5c to help promote 5c texts and calls between network users.

Branded content like this is scary for marketers because once it’s out there it is at the mercy of bloggers, tweeters and enemies of marketing in general. So the idea has to let people share the joke and become active collaborators in it.

The Shrimps didn’t just imitate popular culture, they became a part of it. Pulling this trick off is not easy and the world of branded content is full of road crashes but this worked, perhaps because it is so bizarre. The song itself tickled 20,000 people enough for them to pay money for it. A bold idea that needed a bold client. His reward, an uplift in sales of 50%.