Janet Mesh

I have received so many questions about the Grimace Trend and how McDonald's handled it. I shared on LinkedIn but here is an insider view from the social media team of what happened : - if you think we planted the grimace shake trend, thank you. So much. But you think way too highly of us. This was a level of genius creativity and organic fun that I could never dream about or plan for - it was all from the fans, and the fans only, and the initial spark came from Austin Frazier. Our "only responsibility" in helping the trend happen was giving the "tools" to play with, reintroducing Grimace, the shake and going all in in letting the character take over our accounts. With a particular tone of voice, attitude, "way of typinggg" and taking badly cropped and blurry selfies. - if you think we would never acknowledge the trend, well, I thought so too at first, so I won't blame you. Honestly, I think my very first text to the team and agencies was "not sure we should jump in". It took us a bit of time to process what was happening. The campaign was already wildly successful, both on a social and business standpoint, so why would we take the "risk" to jump in? But hours of watching, reading the comments, trying to learn and genuinely understand helped us see what this was about : brilliant creativity, unfiltered fun, peak absurdist gen z humor, just the way a new generation of creators and consumers play with brands. I've seen videos which levels of production and craft made me smile silently in admiration and wonder. I've seen fan arts that made us send dozen of emails and texts to friends and colleagues saying "omg did you see that"? We then discussed what was the right thing to do about the trend : saying nothing felt disconnected, encouraging it felt self-serving, so we just decided to show our fans that we see them and their creativity in a sweet, candid and genuine way, as grimace would. The same way you would respectfully and gently nod at someone, without repeating what they said to show you agree with them and stealing their thunder. I must also say thank you to our leadership, PR and legal teams for being open, seeking to understand and trust the teams. Was there a lot of questions, sentiment analysis tools, listening dashboards and emails? More than I can count. Was there doubt? Immense doubt. Did we still move forward and get full support up to our top leadership? Sure did. A one of a kind campaign : - Billions in reach, millions in engagements, millions of mentions - Top trend at least 8 different days on twitter - Top 3 hashtags on tiktok and trend on snapchat for multiple days - and more importantly, so many internal teams, agencies and fans genuinely loving grimace and having fun Thank you, Grimace. We miss youuu.

At a Cannes event, Apple's top marketer believes advertising agencies will always exist and should challenge their clients, not agreed with. adweek.it/3r087mr