Last week, McDonalds’ CMO Joel Yashinsky paid a visit to my E-marketing class. If you are unfortunate enough to be a Twitter follower of mine, you would have already been subjected to my many fangirl tweets over said encounter.
When Joel (yes, I’m going to pretend we’re on first name terms when I only spoke to him for about 30 seconds) spoke about his “Our Food. Your Questions.” campaign for McDonalds Canada, he mentioned McDonalds’ transparency platform. Ask. Answer. Amplify.
Through asking the right questions, facilitating a community to answer in a creative way, and amplifying those clever responses to the mass, McDonalds proved themselves as a vulnerable brand. In their response, the audience feels as though they’re speaking with a person, not a multi-billion-dollar corporation.
The key take-away for me was: build a brand that can be bold enough to be vulnerable.
Side note: Joel is such a humble person, he stayed at the end of class to distribute customized McDonalds coupon orders to every student at the lecture – cheers to being classy.
These days, brand transparency is trending hotter than creepy movember moustaches. Maybe that’s the reason a new MTV parody video made by Brian Firenzi and Maria Del Carmen of 5secondfilms has gone viral with over 2 million views in ten days.
In the video “Why Doesn’t MTV Play Music Videos Anymore?”, a pseudo network head of MTV (played by Brian Firenzi himself) tackles the question asked by Natalie (a girl who identifies herself literally as “a female in her mid-20s”. With a blatant disregard and absence of normal, human propriety, Brian Firenzi fires off on a list of reasons why MTV does not in fact play music videos anymore.
Yes it’s crude. Yes it’s a parody. But I can’t help but to think how many brand transparency points MTV would get if they actually condoned and endorsed this video.
We all know MTV shows like Jersey Shore is the filth of television, but if MTV actually owned up to it, I for one would appreciate their honesty.
It's "mei chi" 