Why did the chicken cross the road? To find out the truth about McDonald’s free-range eggs in a new campaign by McDonald’s by DDB, OMD, Mango and 90 Seconds.
Two years ago, McDonald’s New Zealand announced its plan to achieve 100 percent free-range eggs and now, with the help of comedian Rhys Mathewson, it’s taking viewers into Otaika Valley Farm in Whangarei—which is one of the two certified free range farms supplying it with 13 million eggs a year— to see just how free-range the eggs are.
Acting as chief investigator and chicken wrangler, Mathewson poses the question ‘what better way to find what it’s like to be a free range chicken than to be the chicken?’ before sending Robo Chicken (a soft toy on remote control wheels by Rollercoaster) to infiltrate the farm.
What he discovers is the eggs are incredibly free-range, as the chickens have the freedom to roam inside and out with an all you can eat buffet and ‘pool’.
This isn’t the first time McDonald’s has given people a behind-the-scenes look at where its food comes from as its head of communications, Simon Kenny, recalls the ‘Our Food. Your Questions’ campaign from 2015. It opened up a line of communication for people to ask McDonald’s questions ad it responded with videos
Kenny says from those conversations it knew there would be people who didn’t believe that McDonald’s was really using free-range eggs.
“We’ve seen recently some serious questions asked about the legitimacy of some free range eggs in New Zealand.
“We think Robo Chicken is eggs-actly the kind of content we need to show that we’ve cracked the issues of ensuring the eggs we use are certified free range. No egg-ceptions.”
He adds those egg puns are part of the strategy because it knew the content had to be entertaining and credits the DDB creatives for writing the script.
Credits:
Concerned Kiwi: Rhys Mathewson
Client credits:
Director of Marketing: Jo Mitchell
Head of Communications: Simon Kenny
Communications Executive: Sarah Fitzpatrick
OMD credits:
Business Director: Jennifer Hilliar
Digital Director: Scott Allan
Senior Digital Account Manager: Marcel Nel
Fuse credits:
Zoe Virtue: Social Account Director
Hannah Roberts: Account Executive
Mango credits:
General Manager: Sean Brown
Account Manager: Magenta Boyd
Account Executive: Zoe Pert
Otaika Valley Farms:
Director OVFR: Peter Sandle
Account Manager: William Sandle
Farm Manager: James Mason
Production Manager: Trudy Sandle
Talent: Zane Mason
Rollercoaster:
Dominic Oldrey – Prop Master/Project Manager
Lisa Worley – Machinist/Textile Artist
Mathew Probert – Creative
Jonathan Catt – Designer
Jim Christmas – Production Manager
Sharnan Pitcher – Carpenter
