SMS Marketing Campaigns - Is there a campaign going on at McD's?

Julie Ask | May 13, 2005, 01:33 PM

I heard through the grapevine that there was an SMS campaign going on at McDonald's. I'm doing some research now on mobile marketing so I took a quick field trip to my local McDonald's to check it out.

First, I looked around for in-store promotions. None. I began to wonder if this was "one of participating restaurants." I also began to wonder if it was some sort of secret that there was a sweepstakes going on - if you had to be "in the know" to know, you know? I risked it and purchased a quarter pounder with cheese. (I was a bit annoyed that the quarter pounder cost $3.26 and the double cheeseburger was on the "dollar" menu.)

I got my little yellow cardboard box. The top of it said "Take a Shot! You could Win a Trip to the Finals (NBA) 2005." I was at first happy that I'd "Found" the secret short code. I text'ed in my birthdate to short code 49421. Nothing happened. I tried it again. Still, nothing happened.

I flipped the box over - read the fine print. There was a lot of fine print about drawings, dates, prizes, etc. It also said that only up to 300,000 text messages would be accepted. The campaign started on 5/03/05 and is expected to run through 5/26/05.

Had they already reached 300,000 messages? I do know that McDonalds has 30,000 restaurants worldwide and serves 50 million customers a day.

Was my carrier not one of the participating carriers? I've heard that this is a huge hurdle to getting a campaign launched. A number of companies have told me that it takes 6-8 weeks to get the carriers on board for a campaign like this.

What I liked about the campaign:
- Simple
- Integrated with online. If you go to the web site, they collect more information and ask you to opt in for more SMS messages/advertising/alerts for new games, etc.
- Targeted the right audience - youth, urban, basketball fans
- Integrated on packaging

What I didn't like:
- 300,000 entries ... not sure what fraction of the 50 million customers buys a quarter pounder in the US each day ... and I've heard rumors of response rates for campaigns like this in the high single digits ... but do the math ... can something like this last 3 weeks?
- Offline advertising - I didn't see any, but then again, I'm not the target audience. Where is it? Why so low key?
- Purpose of the campaign? Buzz? Traffic? Cheeseburgers?
- No "closure" on my entry - was it accepted? are there other prizes?