SUB CATEGORY :

FICTION & NON-FICTION FILM: UP TO 5 MINUTES

ENTRANT COMPANY :

GEEK PICTURES INC., TOKYO

TITLE :

SMALL MOMENTS, BIG FOR THE HEART.

BRAND :

MCDONALD'S

ADVERTISER :

MCDONALD'S COMPANY (JAPAN), LTD.

AGENCY :

DENTSU INC., TOKYO

CREATIVE DIRECTOR :

HIROSHI SASAKI

ART DIRECTOR :

AKIHIRO HAMABE/URAURAURACHAN

COPYWRITER :

REI HANADA

ILLUSTRATOR :

URAURAURACHAN

PLANNER :

REI HANADA/KAZUKI TORIKOSHI

FILM PRODUCTION COMPANY :

GEEK PICTURES INC., TOKYO

DIRECTOR :

URAURAURACHAN

FILM PRODUCER :

NAOHIRO TANIMURA

PRODUCTION MANAGER :

TSUKASA OWADA/TAKUJI KOBAYASHI

SOUND PRODUCTION COMPANY :

MELODY PUNCH, TOKYO

MUSIC PRODUCER :

KOTARO MARUHASHI

CAMPAIGN SUMMARY :

The purpose of the campaign is to improve sales from the Nighttime Menu, focusing on a reasonably priced French Fries and Chicken McNuggets set offered after 5:00 p.m. every day. It evokes the expression “Nothing special—just a happy time.” Based on this, we have created a short-animation series showing people eating MacDonald’s French Fries and Chicken McNuggets with their friends and families. We had six such ads in 2023 and three sequels in 2024.
All of them are animations depicting the feel of “nothing special” in daily life, offered by McDonald’s.
Through this viral trend throughout the world as well as in Japan, this commercial resulted in the highest reach and the most engagement in the history of official campaigns by McDonald’s Japan. Moreover, this commercial spurred discussion about “where future advertisements will move forward” and “political correctness is spreading in society to such a degree that people feel suffocated.” Thus, this is a piece that caused debates throughout the world.

CREATIVITY/IDEA/INSIGHT :

Standing in contrast to the complex advertisements that are ubiquitous in the modern society and give a sense of information overload, this commercial is differentiated from other advertisements in that it uses a very simple image with very little movement, with animation that almost resembles still images and has peaceful background music.
This commercial uses the Japanese children’s song called Akatonbo (or “Red Dragonflies”) as background music. This song has been familiar to almost everyone in Japan since they were small, and it is reminiscent of the evening. Our goal is to evoke a realistic feeling of daily life through amination.

STRATEGY :

Many people have an image of MacDonald’s merely offering “fast food.” however, McDonald’s provides simple, happy times to many people in reality. Our aim has been to highlight this point.
Therefore, we portrayed people having simple, happy times in our animations based on the theme “Nothing special—just a happy time.”

EXECUTION :

For our first campaign, we released six videos showing people eating French Fries and Chicken McNuggets with friends and family members in autumn in 2023.
As sequels, in autumn of 2024, we issued three videos based on the story about what happened later to the characters who were seen in the videos in 2023.

RESULT :

Nine aminations in total were posted on official McDonald’s Japan SNSs (X and TikTok), and these were shared throughout the world as well as in Japan, resulting in figures for reach of about 400,000,000 and figures for engagement of roughly 1,000,000 in total.
These are record-high numbers for reach and engagement in the history of McDonald’s Japan official campaigns.
Through this viral trend, the number of guests and visitors increased, achieving over 110% of sales growth compared with the results of campaigns from the previous year.
In recent years, people who are weary of the excessive number of advertisements with politically correct themes massively supported our campaign, giving rise to a discussion on “what future advertisements should be like.”