Guillaume Huin@HuinGuillaume
Grimace Shake is trending again as McDonald's Germany just launched it.
When the Grimace trend happened, I led Social for McD US. The one question I kept getting: what happened at HQ when you first discovered it?
Below is a behind the scenes of what happened, sharing actual screenshots of the first text and email I had to send to our leadership back in June 2023.
Let me start with the beginning - if you think we planted the Grimace Shake trend... thank you. So much. But you think way too highly of us. If you thought we would never acknowledge the trend... well, I thought so too at first, so I don’t blame you.
Two weeks into the program, I was randomly scrolling on TikTok at home when I saw one of the infamous videos for the first time. A second one. A third one. I quickly understood there were millions of views on videos of young adults pretending to lose control of themselves when drinking the Grimace Shake.
What I didn’t understand right away, though, was what this meant. As I tried to learn more, I quickly realized I needed to update our teams and leadership. At first, I won't lie, this felt like telling your parents about a massive mistake you made that would ruin all your hard work.
When I sent the first "warning" text to the core team, you can tell from my tone I was trying to reassure them as much I was trying to reassure myself – at the time, none of us anticipated nor understood the magnitude of what was happening.
At first, I was absolutely convinced we would not touch this trend with a ten-foot pole. Not a chance. The team agreed. But our leadership decided to give us some time to analyze the trend in more detail. So, that's what we did, in partnership with our comms team, and you can see in one of the images I posted an extract of the email we sent to our leadership, sharing our recommendation titled "What to do?".
Ultimately, saying nothing felt disconnected. Encouraging it felt self-serving.
So, we decided to show our fans that we saw them and their creativity in a sweet, candid and genuine way on social media, as Grimace would. The same way you would respectfully and gently nod at someone, without repeating what they said to show you agree with them and stealing their thunder.
We started drafting potential response options with our agency partners and comms leads. Some of the initial ideas are below.
We never explored or entertained the idea of doing the trend ourselves. Not even for a second. Maybe it was a mistake, but it just didn’t feel right in the moment. Our intuition was that acknowledgment was what mattered most. One of the images in this post shows the 2 first options we came up with.
In the end, we decided to go one step beyond, using a baby Grimace image, as we knew it was the most candid representation of the character, and it would double down on the way we intended the message to be received. We got alignment from leadership, comms, legal plus some owner operators partners involved in our marketing plans, and then, boom, we posted.
It garnered almost 100K likes on X, 450K on Instagram, 230K on TikTok. In the first two hours we posted, it was probably one of the most monitored posts we've ever done.
The funny thing is... I am not sure we could have replied if Grimace had not taken over of our social media accounts at the beginning of the campaign, as a part of our larger creative efforts to support the Grimace meal. When the trend happened (two weeks in), Grimace was not even supposed to be leading our social accounts anymore. We initially thought we would have Grimace take over for the first few days of the campaign, then go back to business as usual. We usually don’t over-post on campaigns, as we prefer to go back to our evergreen social presence. But due to a mix of external and internal factors, coupled with our fans’ unparalleled love for everything purple (OT7 team, I am talking about you), we decided to keep Grimace in charge for a bit longer.
Pressing the button on that post, both for us and the agency, was an exhilarating moment. This weird sensation when fear and excitement melt into one feeling of supreme adrenaline. People who lead social media for brands will know what I am talking about, being always one post away from glory or chaos.
Thank you for everything, Grimace!
