Canadians are asking questions of McDonald’s.
“Does your Egg McMuffin use real eggs?”
“How is it that Burger King has a veggie burger and McDonald’s doesn’t?”
“Is there beef in your fries?”
“We know that there are questions out there, and that there are myths out there,” McDonald’s Canada chief marketing officer Joel Yashinsky said to The Globe and Mail. “We need to have a conversation with our customers, and social media allows us to do that.”
Of course, there’s transparency and then there’s radical transparency. In this next video, we go behind the scenes to see what’s inside a Chicken McNugget, which pushes the envelope a bit further than the advertising-related question-and-answer video above.
I like this campaign, but I can’t help but wondering how far the brand will go with it, and more importantly, what they may learn in the process. For instance, will McDonald’s Canada entertain this question: “Why do you support factory farms?”
A conversational campaign is a start, a show of good faith, but will McDonald’s Canada ever be able to see themselves as an active driver of a larger environmental and health problem, and then act to modify their practices and run the company in more sustainable ways? I would ask that of the entire corporation, but let’s see if the Canadians can alter not just perception, but reality. Then we can see how that’s playing in Oak Brook.
About David Burn
