Mission Complete: McDonald’s Make a Great Gaming Ad

Gaming is the heartbeat of modern popular culture, but marketers trying to use gaming icons and ideas in their advertising haven’t always fared well. For every bit of brand synergy (like the great Mario x Oreo ad), there’s been a commercial which has left gamers cringing and mainstream audiences baffled.

McDonald’s and Leo UK have just broken the jinx, though, with an integrated marketing campaign – centred on this week’s Ad Of The Week – which manages to use gaming as a metaphor in a way which feels natural and true to both real and virtual life. The central idea of “Side Missions” is that a trip to McDonald’s is exactly that – an optional bonus quest in life which is just as (if not more!) fun than the main mission you’re on. It’s a literally playful metaphor which emphasises the indulgent, pleasurable side of McDonald’s in the same way their great “Raise Your Arches” ad did.

To make the concept work on screen they’ve drawn on gaming iconography across a whole bunch of game genres, eras and formats, from an online gamer popping out of a MMORPG to get a Maccies to in-game characters converging on the Golden Arches. We see partying Sims, colourful platform games, and even hungry dancers doing a rhythm action game on their way to get their meals. The ad is a joyful montage of gamer references linked together by young people suddenly deciding to accept that “side mission”.

The “Side Mission” campaign is mostly happening in the McDonald’s proprietary app, with this hero spot serving as source material for other digital and social activations. There are a variety of ways McDonald’s customers can interact with the campaign, like specific TikTok challenges. But this ad is a summary of the campaign as well as an introduction, and its effectiveness is a good signal as to how well the whole idea will land.

The results for McDonald’s and Leo UK are very strong. On our Test Your Ad platform the ad scores 3.9-Stars, solidly above the 3.1-Star average for Fast Food commercials. But where it really excels is in the short-term Spike Rating and Brand Fluency scores, an Exceptional score in Spike and a maximum 100% score in Fluency. In other words, the ad grabs the attention, is highly motivating for short-term sales boosts and is exceptionally well branded, as well as being very entertaining.

So how have McDonald’s and Leo UK succeeded in this mission of making a really good gaming-based ad? They’ve worked had to be inclusive – every type of game and gamer is here. They’ve made the ad lively and entertaining, with a pumping retro soundtrack from 90s ravers 2 Unlimited. And most of all they’ve leaned into gaming’s status as a pop culture colossus, drawing on its whole history. Cultural references make ads more memorable and entertaining, as anyone who’s read Orlando Wood’s Lemon will know. By tapping into them, McDonald’s has completed this mission in style.