You know how I've been saying the world is shifting to start in-app? This week I have another example of that for you from fast-food giant McDonald's, who saw downloads of its Happy Meal skyrocket.
In case you haven't seen it yet, the Happy Meal app is a collection of games that interact with Happy Meal toys. Considering everything is moving in-app, this move makes a ton of sense. The "new world" is no longer IRL which takes away a lot of the engagement power restaurants have.
Downloads of the app, which was released back in 2013 but didn't get much promotion until now, grew 75x (yup!) to a peak of 38K downloads in a single day (last Sunday) and have kept up for much of the week.
According to our estimates, since the end of August, downloads have added up to 250K. For context, that's more than half of the total downloads the app saw in all of 2020.
McDonald's isn't the first to turn to mobile games as its way of staying relevant. Peloton, Louis Vuitton, and even Netflix are jumping head-first into one of the most competitive areas of mobile and bring their hefty war chests with them.
Will McDonald's get a good return out of this? I think so. With nothing else to do IRL, mobile devices are the main source of entertainment for many kids. Combine that with McDonald's ability to bridge IRL with in-app experiences through its many locations and promotions, and you have what history books may call "evolutionary". Let's see how the king reacts...
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