There was a time when a limited-edition sneaker arrived with a press release and a line around the block. Now it arrives with cryptic coordinates, a vintage-camcorder aesthetic, and a fiberglass Ronald McDonald statue perched on a cliff in the Arizona desert.

Nike and McDonald's, working with their shared creative agency, Wieden+Kennedy New York, staged an elaborate scavenger hunt last month to introduce the Nike Book 2 McDonald's, a basketball shoe developed with Devin Booker, the Phoenix Suns guard. The sneaker itself — white, with a turquoise Swoosh and the familiar golden arch — might have been news enough. But the promotional apparatus around it was designed to make the shoe feel less like a product launch and more like an artifact to be excavated.

Mr. Booker, who was named a McDonald's All-American in high school and has made a habit of hiding signed sneakers in public for fans to find, provided the narrative spine. His agency team and Wieden+Kennedy built a campaign that sent enthusiasts into the Sedona desert, following clues embedded in social media videos shot to resemble found footage. (The effect was somewhere between a sneaker drop and a very well-branded episode of "Unsolved Mysteries.")

The trail led, eventually, to a McDonald's restaurant in Sedona, where a turquoise "Friends and Family" edition of the shoe was available before its wider release on June 2 through Nike.com, the SNKRS app, and select retailers. Mr. Booker himself handed out pairs through the drive-through window.

"This collaboration represents the kind of culture-driven storytelling we want to continue building at McDonald's," said Jennifer Healan, the company's vice president of United States marketing, brand, content, and culture.

The campaign included billboards in New York, Los Angeles, and Sedona, as well as a sweepstakes tied to McDonald's McCafé drinks. But the centerpiece remained the eerie desert imagery and the Ronald statue, which evoked an era — the 1970s through the 2000s — when such figures were a fixture outside the restaurants.

Whether the elaborate staging will move sneakers remains, as always, a question for the quarterly earnings call. But for one week in late May, a fast-food mascot sat alone on a bench in the desert, wearing turquoise shoes, waiting for someone to notice.

Original story published in adweek.com: "Nike, McDonald's, and Devin Booker Turned a Sneaker Drop Into a Desert Scavenger Hunt"