SUPERSIZED SIGNAGE

McDonald’s has been in a worldwide funk. This isn’t some kinda closely guarded corporate secret, everyone knows it, including the new global CEO Steve Easterbrook who made this blunt assessment earlier this year: “Our recent performance has been poor,” he said. “The numbers don’t lie. Our business model is enduring, but no business or brand has a divine right to succeed.”

The US operations has been assailed by perkier opposition such as Chipotle, and losing ground.

The situation is not so different in Australia where restaurants on the rise, such as Grill’d, are gnawing away at McDonald’s bottom line.

Still, the fact is, Australian McDonald’s remains a global bright spot. Sales in the last year have still been growing rather than going backwards. Australia’s McDonald’s is known as an innovator, being brave with its McCafé rollout and our store designs make the US counterparts look stodgy and drab by comparison.

Now, Australia is again showing the way with its innovative application of digital signage.

BIG BITE

I mentioned in my story this issue how the McDonald’s digital signage roll out is akin to the Lassiter’s Reef for suppliers.

Anyone with even a passing interest in signage could see how going digital would work for the fast food giant — I mean, even if you had a digital menuboard whose only party trick was to change automatically after the breakfast menu times out; that’d be a total no-brainer.

Interestingly, McDonald’s didn’t take the big digital leap for years. And when you consider the scale and the complexity of the deployment you can begin to appreciate why.

There are hundreds of outlets: Any deployment would need to be a fairly swift ‘one in, all in’ for fear of certain restaurants being poor cousins and not being immediately in the loop when it comes to special promotions.

There’s no existing playbook: If you thought McDonald’s Australia could simply adopt a US template and run with it, you’d be wrong. The US has itself only just begun a digital menuboard rollout this year, a roll out that borrows heavily from the Australian experience.

CUT LUNCH

With the focus on the enormity of the undertaking, you’d forgive McDonald’s for tentatively dipping its digital toe in water. It makes sense to not jump in over your head. Replacing the traditional behind-the-counter menuboards is a huge operation in itself.

But here’s the thing: there’s nothing expected about the McDonald’s digital rollout, it’s gone well beyond anything anyone could have imagined.

Here’s where Create Your Taste enters, stage right. McDonald’s recognises that it’s having it lunch cut by ‘trendier’ burger and Mexican restaurants as well as other food court fare. Create Your Taste represents a very different McDonald’s, where you design your own burger that takes more time to cook, and is delivered by waitstaff to your table on a platter. Central to the whole transaction is the Create Your Taste kiosk… digital signage, in other words.

Create Your Taste is an Australian innovation. It’s being exported to the US now, where there are high hopes for it.

Another object lesson lies in a quick inspection of the honour board of those involved. Heading up the push is McDonald’s Head of Digital, Mark Wheeler. Mark’s appointment recognises the roll out of digital wasn’t simply Marketing’s job, or IT’s responsibility or even the ‘Restaurant Solutions’ group, it was all three, and it would need someone who could talk the language of all three.

What’s more, McDonald’s got its suppliers right. It retained Guihen Jones, which had many, many years of experience producing Macca’s printed material and was about as instinctively familiar with its DNA as anyone in the country, making the move to digital one of practicalities more than anything.

Coates Signco took it from there, providing the specialist hardware know-how along with getting the digital collateral to the right screen at the right time.

FLIPPIN’ AMAZING

Oh, and one last thing… McDonald’s hired 5000 extra staff to ensure the rollout went smoothly. This is staff who are on the other side of the counter talking kiosk ‘newbs’ through the process. This strikes me as the smartest move of them all. In a world awash with thousands of unloved ‘dark’ screens — where digital signage networks have been installed and commissioned then left to fend for themselves — McDonald’s realises the investment can only succeed with ongoing support; support that flows from the top down.


Christopher Holder, Editorial Director
chris@dsmag.com.au