Keith Nallawalla
I can’t believe I just watched a 2-hour Facebook stream by McDonald’s Australia. Yep, the whole thing. I had no idea it would last for two hours and I feel dumb for waiting it out. Whilst I mostly work in SEO rather than all aspects of digital marketing like I have in the past, I always find any kind of online publicity stunt interesting. I’d never seen a live video like this on Facebook either, full of animated text. Since I have a marketing blog I felt like it was my duty to watch the whole stream just so I could write about it. I did not know it would take 2 hours and do kind of want my evening back.
You can view the original video here.
What’s in the box? Wanna know what’s in the box? Every time someone hits share, the box will open up a little more! So share this post to unveil our brand new menu.
Since the comments section was so entertaining, I took screenshots as it played out. What a wild ride. Overall though, I think this stream was a terrible trainwreck. I suspect they started this hoping to get thousands of shares and it backfired, forcing them to drag it out for two hours.
Here’s a summary of the angry comments section. The comments section is what really kept me going through this. These are not in the exact chronological order, but slowly tell the story of how McDonald’s Australia angered, frustrated and wasted the time of thousands of their fans on a Tuesday night during COVID-19 lockdown.
For some reason, there was a 5-minute timer at the start. This seemed so innocent and was pretty boring. We all thought we’d wait 5 minutes and see what the new burger is. That seems reasonable. Sure, why not.
So within 30 seconds of the timer starting, this guy and others started saying it’s the McSpicy burger. I wish I’d just assumed they were right and tuned out at this point.
At this point, they hit 3.5K viewers and start asking everyone to share to reveal the menu item. What was that countdown for?
Penelope Jane, this has only just begun.
If Michael Sfikas thinks 5 minutes is a waste time… oh boy. McDonald’s Australia’s Facebook hasn’t even started.
Yeah they are… but after 2 hours.
I didn’t share it either.
Everyone was definitely wasting their time, but I’ll take the $10 Melissa.
By the end of this, I felt like pregnancies take a shorter amount of time.
There were a lot of jokes like this. So many slow McDonald’s drive-thrus in Australia, and I guess the whole world.
“Stop being a gronk”.
People don’t l like jumping through hoops for something so trivial.
A lot of people were asking for the person responsible to be fired. This wasn’t even an hour in.
This was starting to get funny. They peaked at 5K in the first 25 minutes and then it started to plummet. People were getting really annoyed and leaving.
People making cancer jokes they’re so mad.
People started to enjoy watching this go terribly wrong.
It’s not good when people want to report your campaign as spam.
My phone almost went flat streaming this.
Lots of people were calling them liars. Not a great look.
There was constant angry reacts being spammed through this. In terms of overall metrics, angry was most popular, getting over 600 of them. This is not something to aspire to.
I really wonder if this is the type of reaction they were going for.
Shoutout to my fellow Victorians in COVID-19 lockdown.
There were a lot of people threatening to get something from Hungry Jack’s (Australian Burger King, which currently has their own Big Mac parody burger), KFC and Red Rooster.
Your live streams should NOT be worse than watching paint dry.
And that’s why this is on the Good/Bad Marketing blog.
Why are McDonald’s ice cream machines always broken anyway? Cleaning cycles I hope.
Losing 4000 viewers on your stream is appalling.
By the time they started opening the box, they dropped to under 1,000 viewers. I think this was about an hour into it. This is after peaking at over 5,000.
People thought hitting 1,000 shares would trigger it. Nope.
Your Facebook live stream should NOT put viewers to sleep.
It’s pretty clear they thought they could hit a certain number of shares. I feel bad for them.
Gen Z marketers are getting blamed for this flop.
I could have played 100 games of Among Us during this.
North Korea probably isn’t the first country that Australian McDonald’s wants to be compared to.
Your live stream is not meant to bore people. Please.
People saying they’re going to come back later is not something to aspire to, McDonald’s Australia.
This guy knows what’s going on.
I cooked and ate dinner whilst waiting.
I’ve never seen so many people giving such negative feedback to such a major brand.
Probably one of the funniest comments.
I’m embarrassed for McDonald’s Australia’s social media team.
At this point over an hour into the video the funny comments really fizzled out as it was mostly new people joining who didn’t get what was going on. Most of the original viewers were long gone.
It took about 10 minutes between each frame of the box opening up. This would have been about 1 hour 45 minutes into it.
At least people liked the music.
You’d think their final reveal would have got more than 12 reactions in the 10 minutes after so many thousands of people viewed and shared the video. If more people saw it they’d probably have corrected “Parmi” to “Parma”.
I wonder what their target was for shares. The above stats are taken soon after it ended.
Ultimately, McDonald’s is such a big brand, this little social media flop isn’t going to hurt them in the long run. They are so convenient and popular even those who were annoyed by this will be over it by the next time they’re hungry.
The real takeaway here is to set realistic goals and targets for metrics if you are holding out a reveal on a live stream. If you can’t hit those numbers, just reveal anyway before everyone leaves.
