In August 2020, McDonald’s was looking for talent for their next big celebrity tray.
Nik Reed and I thought it would be a good idea to pitch the idea of partnering with the K-pop group BTS.
Turns out it was a GREAT idea.
Here are some of our favorite news headlines from the campaign:

To launch the campaign, we immersed ourselves in the BTS fandom and learned everything we could about K-pop culture.
We first teased the partnership by adding a tiny subscript ‘7’ to the McDonald’s social media handle.
This is a “secret code” within the BTS fandom that immediately caused extreme levels of speculation and excitement.
From there, we followed the course of an authentic K-pop release of new music.
Our rollout included lunch parties, concept photos, behind the scenes bloopers, and more.

Nik Reed and I had a hand in every part of the project, from packaging design to convincing McDonald’s to include Korean-inspired sauces with the meal.

The BTS launch tweet quickly became McDonald’s most liked Instagram post ever, their most re-tweeted tweet ever, and the #1 Twitter trend topic in the US (despite NASA going to Mars on the same day). Google searches for BTS reached an all-time high during the meal launch and the BTS meal even made Google’s coveted ‘year in review list’. The campaign has its own wikipedia page and multiple articles about the meal have been published in scientific journals.

The BTS meal resulted in a 41% increase in global sales, had a potential reach of 74.6 billion, garnered 11.5 million social mentions, and had 2,316 earned media placements.

PARTNER: Nik Reed
CREATIVE DIRECTORS: Brandon Henderson & Marques Gartrell
DIRECTOR: Hanki Goh