McDonald's crowdsources new ideas with 'make your own burger' campaign

Summary: McDonald’s has used crowdsourcing to find new ideas for its burgers. Finalists can get their own burger design created and sold to over two million daily visitors in outlets across Germany.

McDonald’s has used crowdsourcing to find ideas for its burger range in Germany. For its 40th birthday celebrations it did not want to follow campaigns promoted across other McDonald’s around the world and create another promotional burger. Instead it created the ‘Mein burger’ campaign.

McDonald’s is often launching promotional burgers. Just watch TV for a few days to find the latest offering. We are becoming jaded. Would another ‘new’ burger generate enough buzz for the brand?
The creative team at Razorfish and the creative Agency Neue Digitale in Berlin decided to create Germany’s first crowdsourced burger. This allowed users to customise exactly the burger they wanted and if a finalist, get it made by McDonald’s.
The fans invented the burgers, voted for their favourites and eventually ate the burgers.
The campaign was very simple. You could build online up to ten of your own designs and put them up to the Burger Gallery for others to vote on.
With a few clicks you could combine your own burger from a list of ingredients. You could personalise your own advertising videos and posters and share them across your social sites. Traditional print posters appeared across Germany exhorting you to vote for that particular recipe over the others.
The campaign gave users the tools to create their own burger, a video, banner and poster. Burger creators could collect votes for their recipes by using crowdsourced advertising.
The 20 burgers with the most votes went into a shortlist and the five best burgers went on sale across all McDonald’s outlets in Germany and Luxembourg.
The 2012 campaign ran for four weeks in February. During the campaign, over 327,000 new burgers were created and social sharing links and adverts ran across sites such as TV, YouTube, Facebook, Radio and e German newspaper Bild.de.
Each of the five finalists has their burgers in restaurants for one week over five weeks from 26th April to 30th May. Over two million people go to McDonald’s in Germany every day, so to have your own burger on the menu choice would be kudos indeed.
The winner of the 2011 competition had their burgers eaten by millions across Germany and each got their own TV commercial. Socially, it was successful too with seven million page impressions on the web site making it McDonald’s most successful campaign ever in Germany.
One and a half million people voted for their favourite burger and the campaign reached every fourth German online user. With the press buzz reaching offline consumers the media team reckon that they reached every fourth German in total.
McDonald’s Germany sold more promotional burgers to more customers earning more total revenue than for any previous burger promotion. Now the 2012 crowdsourced McDonald’s finalists are each on sale for a week.
If you are passing through Germany — there is still time to try the new flavour combinations and vote for your favourite. Who knows, crowdsourced burgers might be coming to a McDonald’s near to you one day…