General information
Sector: Food & Drink
Media: Linear TV, online, social media
Time period: February – June 2022
Case description
Since 2015, McDonald’s has offered children’s books in its Happy Meals, making it a key player in the distribution of children’s books in France. The 2022 collection, written by the well-known writer Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, centred around the theme of ‘difference’ in order to help foster understanding and acceptance of others amongst children. Usually, the audiences from France Télévisions are not considered young enough by McDonald for most of their campaigns, but when it comes to targeting parents – including young parents – and talking about education and culture, it became obvious that the channels of the public service broadcasters’ group were the most relevant for this campaign.
The objective was to continue to build on the successful actions already carried out by McDonald’s to support youth literature, defending its position as a first-mover in the area and bridging nicely what can happen in McDonald’s restaurants with what happens on TV and its digital extensions.
For the first time, FranceTV Publicité, McDonald’s and Starcom joined forces to create “The Happy Meal Book Club” – the first book club dedicated to children’s books in France, led by a leading TV host from France Télévisions, Alex Goude. As commercial communication about literature is not allowed in France on linear TV, the solution was found to use FTV’s digital assets as a platform to reach the right target. The book club was therefore presented in the form of five Facebook / Instagram lives of about 40 minutes broadcast on Alex Goude’s social media accounts, one Wednesday per month from February to June. This special advertising-funded programming took the form of three “seasons”, which are aimed at parents with concrete parenting advice, and which are each dedicated to special problems children might face: “how to help children concentrate thanks to books”, “how to help face fears thanks to books”, “how to help our children deal with emotions thanks to books?” and “how to develop one imaginary world thanks to books?”. France Televisions found that this was the perfect way to bridge the quality content produced by them, and aimed at adults, with the in-store experience at McDonald’s aimed at children.
An exclusive TV campaign was also set up on France 2 to give parents an appointment and encourage them to interact during these live streams, as well as a digital pre-roll and IPTV campaign (ad-on on set-top box), in the form of a ‘best of’, to encourage people to watch it on replay.
Finally, there was a strong editorial support on France.tv through the creation of a branded channel, bringing together all the content announced on the home page of the France.tv website.
The campaign was produced by Le lab, the FranceTV Publicité unit dedicated to branded content.
Campaign results
The campaign was a huge success. In total, 45 million contacts were reached and the number of video views was close to 10 million. The completion rate was 78% and the engagement rate was 17%.