Meet McDonald’s Romania’s Wacky New Family
“At McDonald’s, good value for money is one of the conditions of every customer proposition,” reveals Irina Angelescu, marketing director at McDonald’s Romania. This is why the brand always aims to deliver delicious, feel-good moments at the right price that always feels like a good deal.
Building on this promise, the fast food chain is constantly looking for innovative ways to bring real value for money to life, through deals, combos, innovation in taste or innovations in formats and sizes. This is why they teamed up with DDB Romania, to propose a new, customisable bundle that McDonald’s fans can design, as part of its Home Menu Bundle, initially launched in 2021.
So, as the third year of the Home Menu in Romania began, a new communication platform came to fruition, with brand new characters based on Romanian archetypes that DDB found through local research. The family we see in the launch film is a seemingly normal one, but when analysed through a closer lens, we see some peculiarities - Maria, the main character and daughter, is the ever-calculating wunderkind chess master and a mirror for those Romanian customers that always want to outsmart their budget. And with McDonald’s, they can. A fusion between ['The Queen’s Gambit’ protagonist] Beth Harmon and Wednesday Adams, but with her unique personal traits, Maria is the one that those Romanians with an entrepreneurial spirit are going to relate to most, while there is something for everyone in the rest of the characters.
The iconic McDonald’s family is expected to appear in further iterations of the platform, primarily on digital, so keep your eyes peeled.
In the meantime , LBB’s Zoe Antonov spoke to Irina Angelescu, and DDB Romania’s senior copywriter Alexandru Iliescu, strategy director Ioana Dobrinescu and account director Georgiana Rotaru, to find out more about the strategy behind the film, how the individual characters are constructed and what place McDonald’s holds in Romanian hearts.
LBB> What was your brief for this campaign and why was this idea the winning one?
Irina> The brief integrated two opportunities that we identified in our planning – on the one hand, the need for format innovation and on the other, the need to develop a clear communications platform for all our good value products and activations.
Our Home Menu bundle was launched in 2021 and has been brought back every year since. But in 2023, we decided to add flexibility to great value and therefore proposed a bundle that customers could design by choosing their meals. We used the already established Home Menu as the first flight of our new communications platform. By introducing a family of four very different characters that find common ground over a McDonald’s dinner, there is a great opportunity to develop fun and relatable stories that can evolve around our products, meals and occasions.
Georgiana> The third year of Home Menu came, naturally, with the need to start a communication platform under which all of McDonald's offers and promotions can be found. Through the Home Menu campaign, we aim to set the creative direction and concept, and to accustom consumers to some characters and an executive style that they recognise as one that always brings them something extra (from bundles, to discounts, extra products, or extra benefits).
LBB> What kind of research went into the creation of the campaign?
Irina> We are tracking brand metrics, such as good value for money, in a monthly study that gives a good indication of where we need to play and what we need to communicate. Moreover, Home Menu was a proven success from previous years and similar bundles were also showcased as good practices in our global network. This gave us the confidence to not only promote Home Menu for the third year but also use it to launch our new approach to value communication.
LBB> Was there a key finding that got you started on your ideas?
Ioana> For McDonald's to remain competitive, in terms of value, we had to investigate how people perceive something as valuable. Through ethnographic research, we discovered that many individuals in Romania have an entrepreneurial mindset, seeking to optimise the balance between time, money, and quality in their favour. This cognitive pattern was consistently observed during our research.
LBB> Tell me about the brand value platform that you're launching - and why was this campaign the best approach to it?
Irina> Good value for money comes in all shapes and sizes at McDonald’s – the double or the triple burgers offering customers more of the tastes they love, always on affordable prices, special occasions that we celebrate with freebies and great deals (e.g. Ice Cream Day or Drive Thru Day), XL meals that are a great always-on deal, different bundles and boxes and our McDonald’s mobile app – a place for our loyal customers to enjoy great deals. They all needed to sit together under one umbrella so that the value message would be easier to understand, clearer and more single- minded. By showcasing different characters in our campaign, we are showcasing different types of customers with their different needs, and this will allow us to build on the same concept every time we will communicate value and affordability at McDonald’s.
LBB> How do the characters in the campaign film resonate with the brand pillars?
Irina> For this first piece of communication, we decided to launch with a family that seems like a pretty classic one, but every individual is different and comes from a different place – like in a real family. We feel that these characters are mirroring our customers – some are always on the lookout for great deals and are always doing the maths (like Maria, our main character), some always want to have fun and McDonald’s can be their little bubble of joy (like Fabian, Maria’s brother), others are the caregivers and want to make sure that everyone comes together around the dinner table (this would be Maria’s mum) and some are hungry more or less all the time (like Maria’s dad in our film). We hope to be able to uncover more of each of the characters as we continue to build our platform and match this family’s occasion to our customer occasions and needs.
LBB> And how were the characters developed from an agency’s point of view?
Alexandru> You know the old saying, ‘you can't choose your family’? Well, that's certainly true for the family we feature in our story. We have a family of four that, despite their major differences, work together like a well-oiled machine. That's because our goal was to create distinct characters that different people in our audience could see themselves in.
As for Maria, we wanted her to create an instant impact and leave a strong impression in our viewers' memoriesy. So we took a page out of pop culture's book and infused her character with a bit of Beth Harmon and Wednesday Adams. Yet, Maria is her own person. She's got the smarts of a chess genius and a no-nonsense attitude, but, as a true Romanian, she also genuinely cares for her family and always strives to find the positive solution for every situation.
LBB> Why was it so important to make the family so memorable and how did you make sure that came through in the film?
Alexandru> We're aiming to create a communication platform that sticks around for a while, so it's important that our characters are memorable and easy for our audience to connect with. We want people to remember them and be excited to see them in future campaigns. To really set our characters apart, we've made sure that each one has a distinct personality that's not only fun and intriguing, but also brings a fresh perspective to the typical family of four. This helps our characters stand out and makes them more relatable to a wider audience. We've also thrown in some spicy traits and other characteristics that we're excited for viewers to discover along the way, as the platform develops.
LBB> What kind of expectations do Romanians have of McDonalds and how did you meet them in this campaign?
Irina> McDonald’s is a beloved brand in Romania and everywhere else in the world. Therefore, expectations from our customers are very high in terms of taste, quality, convenience and value.
What is very specific to Romanians is that they want to feel like they are always making the smartest decisions. They like to feel that they can outsmart their budgets or different situations and enjoy the best deals for themselves or their loved ones. Our Home Menu Mix campaign and the entire platform are building on these smart customer propositions we are constantly striving to deliver.
LBB> When directing the ad at Romanians, what did you take into consideration in terms of societal insight?
Ioana> Before my colleagues got to direct the ad, we looked into what people needed.
Inflation and societal unpredictability make it harder to meet desirability versus affordability. McDonald's wants to be there and serve value. Tackling economic issues is not in the brand DNA, so we dug into local stories to find out where McDonald's is valued most. So, we also got to families - the target group represented in the platform narrative. The different viewpoints and need for structure, love, and empathy give us the premises to build endless stories.
LBB> How are we going to see the characters return in the future?
Georgiana> We plan to take the story further digitally, a territory where we can build more of the personality of each character. We want people to identify with the characters we build, but, more than that, we build characters that represent McDonald’s customer typologies. Through this series we want to bring that extra value that McDonald’s customers can enjoy. Thus, in addition to good food, we offer them entertainment.
LBB> Why did you decide to pick the game of chess as the central piece of the film?
Alexandru> Maria's defining trait is her mathematical way of thinking and problem-solving skills, so naturally we thought chess would be the perfect game to showcase her character. Of course, as her story and that of her family progresses, we may discover that Maria has a passion for other strategy games like Go or Shogi.
LBB> What has the reaction of the public been so far?
Ioana> It's usually "Wow", as in "this is the McDonald's that I know, and I've always expected".
