There is something almost refreshing about a marketer admitting, in public, that the first idea was not good enough.
Morgan Flatley, the global chief marketing officer of McDonald's, told Adweek this week that the company's original concept for its World Cup campaign had centered on the "field of play" — a phrase that, in advertising terms, usually signals a safe visual vocabulary of grass, goals and branded corner flags. The idea had progressed quite far through the development process before Ms. Flatley and her team decided to abandon it.
"It just kept sticking with me that it felt like any brand could do that," Ms. Flatley said, "and we should be doing something that's uniquely McDonald's."
The result, according to the company, is its largest World Cup marketing effort ever and its biggest campaign of the year, running across more than 110 countries. (The specifics of what, exactly, makes it "uniquely McDonald's" were not detailed in the announcement, though one imagines the Golden Arches will make an appearance.)
McDonald's has been a FIFA World Cup sponsor since 1994, when the tournament was held in the United States, and has renewed that relationship through multiple controversies, ownership changes at the governing body, and at least one relocation of the event to the desert in winter. The company's commitment to the property has outlasted several of its advertising agency relationships.
The creative work for the new campaign is being handled by Wieden & Kennedy, the Portland-based agency that took over global duties for McDonald's in 2019 after decades of account shuffling among various Omnicom and Interpublic shops.
Whether the final campaign lives up to the ambition of being something no other brand could do remains to be seen. But the willingness to kill a concept that merely worked — rather than one that failed — is a rarer instinct than it ought to be.
Original story published in adweek.com: "How a Scrapped Idea Kicked Off McDonald's Biggest-Ever World Cup Push"