To commemorate Father’s Day 2017, McDonald’s Philippines released a digital ad campaign, titled “Wait Lang Po” (Please, wait). The minute-and-a-half video opens with a scene showing a father waiting in a hospital’s maternity ward. A McDonald’s cup of coffee was in his hand.
The video then progressed to diverse frames capturing the patience of fathers as they watched over their children in different places such as a school’s entrance gate, a kindergarten room and a bus stop. A warm smile spread across their faces as soon as the second person’s arrival cut through the video. The ad concluded with a pitch-black frame with these words: Salamat po sa paghihintay (Thank you for always waiting).
This digital ad became McDonald’s Philippines’s winning entry in the first-ever YouTube Ads Awards, held on May 10 at the Bonifacio Global City Arts Center.
Early last year the video-sharing platform sounded the call for entries for digital ads that offered high-quality content, rich narratives and innovative advertising executions. Entries were then judged by a panel based on their content, effectiveness, engagement and business impact.
From hundreds of video submissions, the awards panel produced a shortlist of 57 YouTube digital ads, which were then trimmed some more before finally being cited as Crystal (the highest recognition), Second Prize and Third Prize awardees.
Two Crystals went to Unilab’s “Son,” a moving depiction of a mother’s sacrifices, and Globe’s “Kaleidoscope,” a mini-series on modern-day artists. Globe and Jollibee brought home the most number of winnings, with five awards each. Their videos, “Because you can never have too many dogs” and “Kwentong Jollibee: Vow and Crush,” won the Second and Third Prizes.
“Wait Lang Po” claimed the coveted Ad of the Year plum. The video also won two Crystals for the Food and Beverage and Storytelling for Occasions categories.
The delivery of such heartwarming narrative, according to McDonald’s Philippines Assistant Product Manager Bea Coronel, was achieved by successfully utilizing consumer insights to their brand’s business model. In the sidelines of the Ads Awards event, Coronel said: “Everything we do is grounded on that. Beyond selling products, we sell relevant stories. Whether it’s Father’s Day or Christmas, people can relate to our ads because they see themselves there.”
McDonald’s Philippines ventured into digital advertising as early as 2011, producing some of the most popular online videos in the digital marketing landscape, such as the classic Jessy Mendiola and the Teng bothers’ McSpicy Shake Shake Meal commercial.
“McDonald’s has always invested on digital,” the brand’s Marketing Director Christina Lao said. “The management are believers of digital because they can really see the returns.”
This particular video by the global food chain cost a third of an average television ad and, in a platform such as YouTube where end-users can specifically pick the content they want to consume, proves the development of digital storytelling in today’s marketing industry, this according to Google Philippines Country Head Ken Lingan.
“Seven years ago, we introduced a skip button during the launch of our true view video format. At the time, it was a game changer because for the first time, we gave users the power which ad he or she would choose to watch. Now, the benchmark for creativity is even higher because each brand now has to earn the right not to be skipped,” Lingan said.
He continued, “Stories that move hearts and minds, it is the core of marketing. The goal of storytelling and marketing has not changed. We now see that the tools have definitely changed the way [consumers] are entertained, the way [an ad] commands their attention.”
“This year, we see 95-percent year-on-year growth on global watch time. A lot of this growth is primarily because of the content you see in a platform,” Lingan added.
“YouTube is a great canvas for creative storytelling for brands. There’s no limit to how many minutes you’re going to put in an ad, there are no restrictions that you have to put it in between segments and there’s no restriction in format. You don’t even have to be locked to one type of creative campaign. The technologies that you see on YouTube today allows us to give the right message to the right audience at the right time.”
Lingan stressed that storytelling, in many narratives and formats, continues to shape the way advertising is gradually shifting from the traditional to the nonconformal, slowly, like how the father made his way through the maternity ward, leaving his McDonald’s coffee on the chair where he had been patiently waiting.