CATEOGORY: Promotional Web Site
FIRST PLACE: Mobile Marketing SECOND PLACE: E-mail Marketing SECOND PLACE: Promotional Web Site
AGENCY: TMSW
CLIENT: McDonald’s
Monopoly at McDonald’s is not just a promotion, it’s a tradition, a cult even. The online game has grown since its inception six years ago to nearly 4 million players and 69 million codes entered. It appears to have grown, in fact, to be a promotion that regular McDonald’s customers look forward to every year with fervor.
In 2009, however, TMSW, the agency of record for the promotion, had some new challenges to deal with. There would be a 10 percent reduction in the number of codes in the market, due to a change in labeled products. At the same time, they were asked to beat last year’s numbers in a big way: by achieving greater online game participation, encouraging players to play longer, enticing them to come back often throughout the month, and engaging young adults to play the collect-and-win online game.
TMSW wanted to increase involvement in order to increase sales, so they added a mobile Monopoly Facebook app and a web-exclusive gateway to a daily $1 million dice roll promotion which was televised on NBC.
Utilizing McDonald’s extensive e-mail database of avid Monopoly players and customers from prior years, TMSW generated high interest in the game a week before it started. The first two weekly mailings had the highest clickthrough rates — 20.0 and 19.6 percent, respectively — with the program overall generating a hefty 13.2 percent, the highest they had ever received.
More than 400,000 players who lapsed for seven days received reactivation emails that was successful in enticing them to return to the game and enter an additional 3.8 million product codes from nearly 2 million additional product purchases.
Over the six-week promotion period, the Monopoly at McDonald’s online game generated a total of 6 million emails and 1 million clickthroughs to the game website. Consumers entered almost 73 million codes — a 6 percent increase over 2008 — and the site attracted nearly 18.5 million visits from 4 million registered players.
With the additional involvement and communications, this promotion not only exceeded McDonald’s’ goals, it shattered every record for metrics from previous years’ Monopoly promotions. Now that’s what I would call a special sauce.
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