CASE STUDY:  McDonald’s RUMAC

One of the biggest opportunities for mobile marketing is consumer packaged goods. ipsh! has pioneered such campaigns with a few major brands in the summer of 2005 but none had the metrics to really influence Madison Avenue like McDonald’s House of Blues promotion.

ipsh! interactive was used for this House of Blues McDonald’s sweepstakes with unique “Mac” codes printed on 50 Million BigMac boxes nationwide. Users texted in to the shortcode RUMAC to win. They also had the option to sign up online at www.playatMcD.com (no longer live).

This campaign was a great experiment in showing how there is an increasing number of users who, given a chance, will interact with an advertising campaign on the spot, via their handsets.

We didn’t anticipate such a great response but we saw 40% of entries were made through the shortcode vs. the web demonstrating that people want to interact on the go.

Supporting material- Vital Stats
50 million boxes
3% increase in sales of Big Macs
13.41% sms to opt-in
40% of entries via txt

Takeaways
McDonalds and ipsh! was cited in Advertising Age based on the remarkable results. Reps from McDonalds credit this House of Blues mobile campaign with 3% increases in sales of Big Mac sandwiches. This is a tremdous ROI in the world of consumer goods. Also, 40% of the entries were made via text message, twice the figures McDonald expected. Conversion rates for SMS to opt-in is over 13%.  This helps to build a solid opt-in list of users for future McDonald promotions.

The mobile component of this campaign was possible with the ipsh! PRISM platform.