Frank Kern's State of The Internet Address

Big companies piss away a ton of money all the time on things don't work. McDonalds aren't any exception to this rule.

IF everyone went on the premise of the "brainwashing technique", and relied on it, because that's what it essentially is, we wouldn't be doing so well. Your main objective as business owner is to bring in sales by selling a quality product, then your second objective is to brand. McDonalds didn't get where they are because of their name, they got where they are because they offer cheap food (and I don't consider them "quality", but I don't eat fast food) for families that anyone can afford (this equals more sales, not because of their name, because it's affordable, that has nothing to do with branding). If you don't understand the difference, you won't get very far in this industry.

And think about this, IF they were really doing so great (and I don't think they are as much as they used to), why do they continuously have FREE coffee deals? There's been 2 here in BC in less than 6 months.

You also seem to be forgetting one KEY thing, they're targetting a gaming audience, not a very effective audience to begin with. Stupid campaign? I'd say so, now maybe if McDonald's delivered food, threw in some coupons, it would've been better, but since they don't, it was in fact stupid and a waste of money.

Says who? Recessions are best times for inferior good vendors to brand and advertise.
McD's sales have been going up all the time -- that's BECAUSE of the poor economic times. Study some economics - inferior goods increase in demand during recessions and vice versa. McDonalds sells inferior goods - fast, cheap things to put in your stomach when you can't afford real food. Thus, it is better for them to brand themselves right now.


2 problems with this - :

1. Millions of dollars is not as big a deal to McD as it is to you. For them, this was like running a $300 PPC campaign to see if it was effective or not.

2. Who says they can't tell the results? They saw a clear increase in their sales volume. As long as they make a net profit, worst case scenario they just branded themselves for future purposes - still a good thing.

I'm guessing you don't really know what I do which is why you'd say this. I work with some of the bigger companies in the auto industry and I do work on both brand awareness as well as point-of-sale based advertising. Branding advertising is wasted money if you do it incorrectly. I agree that 95% of companies should stay away from branding, but ubiquitous companies like McD can't go wrong with even global campaigns during a recession.

I frankly don't see a big diff. between Frank's approach and McD's. In fact, McD's had a better idea of their demographics (easy to find out the age, gender, education level and so on of Farmville players) and the demand for their product in that demographics before they began. Frank has literally no clue as to who watches his video and what they think of it. Overall, you're relating better with Frank because his budgets and strategies and more on level, while McD's is on a different planet in terms of volume and budget.

Back to the original point - Frank can't track their sales. They can see the effects of their advertising reflected very well in sales volume. And you think they don't gather feedback on their advertising?? You or me (or Frank) don't have access to the data that McD's is collecting. This is why I find it so pretentious that some marketer in the IM niche would pass a judgement on McD's campaign without any access to their data.

McD spent some money on advertising. They saw an increase in sales. They think it was money well spent.

Along come us 'genius' marketers to pick apart the whole thing and claim that McD has no idea what they were doing and this is poor marketing. Quite pretentious in my opinion.