McDonald’s (MDNDF) has launched a new TV commercial and it doesn’t drop the name of the fast food giant once. Neither does the ad feature on the company’s Facebook (FB) page, Twitter (TWTR) account or its YouTube channel. There’s no Big Mac, no Golden Arches, and definitely no Ronald McDonald.
What the ad does have is U.S. actress Mindy Kaling—in a yellow dress against a red background—urging her audience to Google “that place where Coke tastes so good” the New York Times reports.
McDonald’s coy new marketing campaign, aims to capitalize on the way young people are “discovering information” they trust via their smartphones and other devices while watching TV. That’s according to McDonald’s chief marketing officer for the U.S. Deborah Wahl. Young people are “very influenced by word of mouth and what their peers say,” she told the Times.
On her Twitter page Friday, Kaling wrote that she’d “partnered with a brand without being able to say the name of the brand.”
McDonald’s new ads were created by a Chicago-based agency called We Are Unlimited, which counts Twitter, Facebook, and Google employees among its staff. According to the Times, Google’s assistance did not extend to influencing search results, Wahl said, and McDonald’s did not pay Google so that good reviews would feature more prominently in users’ searches.
“Google didn’t give us any tricks on search or anything,” Wahl said. “What they’re helping us do is understand if people are really searching as a result of this, and offering close feedback and collaboration in terms of what’s happening with this with real behavior.”
Last week, a Burger King commercial that aimed to activate voice-responsive Google devices so that they described its burgers drew fire from the Google, which had not been involved in the campaign.
