Happy Meal Readers: making reading fun

Agency
BE—IT Agency
Challenge
In January 2019, McDonald’s rolled out the Happy Meal Readers program in Ukraine enabling families to choose books along with toys in Happy Meal. The main reason was that, according to statistics, 4 out of 5 Ukrainian parents do not read to their children; half of the Ukrainian adults do not read books at all. Grown-ups think that reading is boring.

SOLUTION

We at Be—it Agency decided to change the attitude towards reading in the society, thus building a long-term relationship between Mcdonald's and its clients. 

To make reading fun both for parents and children, we brought to life a story of Happy Meal books, created by Cressida Cowell exclusively for McDonald’s — a story about a family that travels back in time to study dinosaurs. We designed campaign experiences for parents and children, so that parents could actively participate and feel that fun.

As a role model of the campaign we invited a progressive multi-artist and a father of two sons Monatik, adored both by adults and children. 

We put a huge dinosaur footprint near a McDonald’s restaurant in Kyiv to spark interest in the story. Photos with the footprint quickly flooded the social media informing the public about our campaign. Then, we launched a contest in social media searching for the biggest dinosaur fans. We also filmed an emotional video with MONATIK, a popular Ukrainian singer and young parent, reading Happy Meal books to the kids. It instantly went viral.

To launch the books, we arranged a public reading by MONATIK. It gathered around 200 children and parents, including influencers & journalists. Other parents and an array of Ukrainian influencers joined us in social media and presented their own way of fun and interactive reading​.

RESULTS

We started a discussion on a critical topic of families spending quality time together 
Campaign got over 8,000,000 impressions 
Over 7,000,000 impressions in earned media
+20% in sales of books in Happy Meal during the first week
‘McDonald’s allows kids and families to have fun together’ indicator grew according to the plan