McDonald’s Canada Reignites Gen Z's Love for the Big Mac in Campaign from Cossette

In 1968, McDonald’s Canada introduced a burger so iconic and recognisable, it could be identified by its ingredient list alone: two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun. The Big Mac: A sandwich so influential, it's become a defining menu item for McDonald’s restaurants, while simultaneously transcending that status to become an icon of pop culture and Americana.

Though the Big Mac is a long time fan favourite, research showed that Gen Z were not talking about the sandwich as the icon it is. To properly reintroduce the Big Mac to the next generation, McDonald’s Canada and Cossette launched the Inspired by Big Mac marketing campaign targeted toward Gen Z and their love of creativity and self-expression. 

McDonald’s partnered with a variety of Gen Z makers, each specialising in a different form of visual art, with the objective of illustrating the Big Mac’s unique ability to inspire culture. From Big Mac inspired cowboy boots, to 3D character design, and even a bejeweled set of Big Mac grills, the campaign sought to reintroduce the Big Mac as an icon, by showing the different ways it could appear in cultural avenues relevant to Gen Z.   

McDonald’s Canada’s marketing agency, Cossette, brought the campaign to life via assets created for OLV, paid social, contextual OOH, and a Pinterest specific activation.

Alongside launching on McDonald’s owned social, the campaign also leveraged Pinterest’s ever-growing audience of Gen Z to inspire them with custom Big Mac boards. Identifying relevant audience interests and aligning them with some of Pinterest’s most popular categories (i.e., Beauty, fashion, home décor), the Big Mac Boards pulled pins strictly from the colour palette of the Big Mac to build the iconic sandwich virtually on the platform. Pinterest is a place where people come with intent to take action on the ideas they discover, so the boards also included hidden AI generated Big Macs to fit within the category of the board, which when commented on by Pinners, unlock discount codes to be redeemed via the McDonald’s app.