McDonalds Cheer for China
Campaign Summary
The upcoming 2008 Beijing Olympics, could also be nicknamed the “Marketing Olympics” as there have never been so many official sponsors and marketers competing for consumer attention. The Success key was to unlock the collective pride of the nation and enable people to individually cheer for China’s Olympic teams, thus generating a campaign with enormous proportions: we had over 25 million visitors to the website in the first 6 weeks!

Marketing Challenge and Objective
The first major challenge was to unlock the sponsorship value of the brand itself. Despite its significant growth in China during the past few years, McDonald’s is still regarded as a foreign brand. We used this campaign as a chance to bring the brand closer to the Chinese people. McDonald’s became a vehicle to allow Chinese people to share their pride and dreams for the upcoming Beijing Olympics.

Target Markets
Everyone in China!

Strategy
Phase I: Collective individualism


>> Phase I (no longer online)
Most Olympic sponsors are supporting individual athletes in their campaigns, but we wanted to create a real “team spirit” and give everyone the chance to get involved with the Olympics. Since ‘I’m lovin’ it’ is McDonald’s global catchphrase, we combined these two concepts to create a new catchphrase for the Olympics “I’m loving it when China wins”.

Fully Integrated
We created a fully integrated campaign which included the We encouraged participants and visitors to the site to vote for their favorite Cheerer.
Special channels were selected for maximizing communication impact:

1. Press conference - This event attracted over 700 nationwide press articles, the entire press conference was broadcasted on Sina.com (China’s largest news website)
2. Viral videos - to create word of mouth and initiate buzz for the campaign we produced amusing viral videos which we planted on popular site.
3. Interactive banners - To encourage clicks and drive traffic to the site.
4. Interactive cheering station - This innovative video capturing station enabled consumers who visited the restaurants to participate in the campaign. They just stepped inside the booth and recorded their cheer, which was immediately uploaded to the website.


5. In-store POSM – drove millions of McDonald’s customers to participate.
6. Website - A repository for all videos, highly engaging content from consumers and continuous encouragement to participate in this campaign.
7. Innovative media partnership - Partnering with QQ.com (China’s largest online community), we used their vehicle to reach out to consumers. We also partnered with Sina who kept track of the campaign on their news site.
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8. BLOG partnership - We partnered with celebrity bloggers and Olympic athlete’s blogs to encourage them to discuss this campaign on their blogs.

Phase II: Chosen Ambassadors

The top 10 cheerers were selected, having Intensive training;
5 best cheerers were selected in a final competition to lead the national McDonald’s Olympic Cheering Team;
Real-time episodes were broadcasted in McDonald’s stores and on the internet to sustain public interest.

>> Phase II (no longer online)

Phase III: National cheer-leaders to cheer for china

5 best cheerers being picked by a panel of celebrity judges led 1,200 people in Beijing to dance together -- just meters from Beijing’s Olympic, -- Bird’s Nest -- Stadium. Dressed in red outfits they performed ‘I’m lovin it when china wins’ dance to create a new world record.

Enter Website(campaign site)


Campaign Results and measurement

The massive traffic to the McDonald’s Cheer website made it the Number 1 most popular website as ranked by Google China when searching for Olympic cheering information. We did not purchase any key search words to enhance results.

1,200,000 members of the McDonald’s Olympic Cheering Team.
213,364 people played DIY Dancing Game.
2,396,596 people viewed the MV.
13 million views of the reality show.
27 million visits to the official website.