SINGAPORE: In Singapore’s competitive food delivery category, McDonald’s cannot afford to rest on its laurels, according to senior executives who worked on the award-winning McDelivery campaign which topped the global Gunn Media 100 rankings this year.

Consumers know that at times their food will be delivered quickly, at times it will take longer, Sadhan Mishra, Regional Business Director at OMD Singapore, told WARC in an exclusive interview. “What we observed was Singapore consumers get very angsty when their expectation is not met.

“As an organisation, as a company, when we set an expectation in front of a consumer and we’re not able to deliver on it – that’s when they become really, really unforgiving,” he said.



Read WARC’s exclusive story on how McDonald’s and agency partner, OMD Singapore, built the world’s top media campaign: How McDonald’s used data to solve its business challenge.
With 15% sales potential lost because of order capacity limitations, something had to change. In a company first, McDonald’s integrated first-party restaurant operations data with Google’s hyper-local targeting to maximise media cost-efficiency and manage consumer expectations of delivery time, through tailored messages and mapping real-time restaurant data against paid search spends, via a live API.

Using a custom-built coding script, neighbourhoods were then categorised as high, medium or low capacity in real time as demand fluctuated. If demand spiked in an area and delivery wait time was compromised, search advertising spend – the most effective driver of online orders – decreased immediately in response.

The results were beyond expectations, with a 9% growth in average monthly revenue and a 58% greater return on ad spend.

“Singapore was ready from an infrastructure perspective, and I think from a maturity perspective – in terms of our marketing team, our marketing spend, our composition, and also the ability for us to really make a difference to the business,” said Josephine Tan, Global Media Director at McDonald’s, based in Singapore, on why the city-state was a great place to launch the project.

“It’s a real business challenge that we have, it’s not something that is innovation for innovation’s sake,” she added.

Sourced from WARC