The Challenges Of Marketing Content: The Example Of McDonald’s

Deborah Wahl, McDonald’s CMO, spoke at the Mixx Conference organized by the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

She said:

“In the last two years, we have created approximately 2,500 pieces of marketing content a year. This year, we will create roughly 5,000 pieces of marketing content, so we are making more content but we are also challenging ourselves to make our content much more valuable to our customers.“

On Snapchat, for example, McDonald’s set up geofilters around its 14,000 restaurants last year. Snapchat users can add an image of French fries to their snaps. These filters have been used 12 million times and generated 308 million views.

In the U.S., McDonald’s is mentioned every other second on the social web. The company “only” replies to one mention every ten seconds. Deborah Wahl therefore acknowledges the brand’s room for improvement in this area.

Brands that use content marketing run the risk of having the quality of their content production diminish as its quantity increases.

To mitigate this risk, CMOs should ask themselves three fundamental questions:

1. What is their brand’s editorial policy (values, positioning, message platform, tone of voice…)?
2. Who is their editor in chief, i.e. the individual in charge of enforcing said editorial policy in all content produced by the company?
3. What is their process to ensure that the quality of their content production does not diminish as its quantity increases?