McDonald's savours the message

By IRENE CHAPPLE

Back in the good old days, it was simply a matter of whether you wanted fries with your burger. Later, "upsized" Coke or fries became the marketing rage.

Now McDonald's has trumped the lot with a text-messaging campaign that pulled 1.5 million entries in five weeks and is being touted as the biggest of its type in New Zealand.

The aim was to sell more "combo" meals and to gather a database of McDonald's customers, targeting those aged from 15 to 24.

Customers seeking a simple quick burger or fries were enticed to upgrade to a "combo" - or even a "supercombo" - by being offered the chance to enter a texting competition.

Each customer received an entry card with a unique code, and texted it back for an immediate response.

The 300,000 prizes included fries, cellphone airtime and the chance of a trip to Australia.

From all accounts, the campaign, which finished this month, worked extremely well. It is believed to be the biggest dual-telco (Telecom and Vodafone) campaign in New Zealand and attracted up to 50,000 text messages a day.

While sales numbers remain secret, McDonald's spokesman Jason Paris said sales of "combo" meals rose substantially.

Perhaps most importantly, the company now has a database of "tens of thousands" of its customers who joined, via their cellphones, a programme to receive more information from McDonald's.

The company does not yet know anything about those customers except their telephone numbers, that they like fast food, and the number of times each entered the competition.

But it intends to find out much more about these customers, first by directing them to websites and then by asking them to fill out questionnaires.

"These people have opted to hear from us again ... and we have a few ideas on how we can get to know them a bit better," said Paris.

Such information - a goldmine for marketers - is then used as highly specific market research for the global burger giant.

Indeed, the New Zealand campaign attracted so many participants that it is being used as a case study for the worldwide franchise.

Steve Shearman is a director of Touchpoint, which provided the technology.

Cellphone campaigns using the Touchpoint product can cost from $4000 for a basic competition to $50,000 for a long-running, complex strategy.

The McDonald's campaign had some complexities - ensuring the prize of free airtime supplied by Telecom was given to its customers, for example - so sat somewhere above the basic cost, said Shearman.

Fast-food customers and cellphone users were a natural fit, he said, which helped to make the campaign a success.

"The prizes were also pretty tempting, and the one in five [prize-winning entry] is attractive. And the consumers always have their mobiles in their pockets ... "

Shearman said New Zealand had become innovative in its text-messaging tactics, and had avoided the excesses experienced in overseas markets.

In Britain or the United States, for example, consumers had been inundated with text "spam" from numerous telcos.

The customers responded by turning off their phones.

Shearman said that because New Zealand had just two telcos, advertising tactics could be controlled.

He predicted there would be an explosion of such campaigns over the next year. Instant information meant the advertiser could monitor the progress of the campaign: previously information came via truckloads of letters.

Beyond the simple text messaging, the arrival on cellphones of picture and video capabilities would ensure marketers had even greater hooks for the consumer, Shearman said.

"More and more we are getting asked, 'Is a mobile campaign appropriate for this?"'