If Thanksgiving leftovers aren’t your thing, consider entering McDonald’s latest contest, which gives Twitter users the chance to win free late-night food for an entire year from Uber Eats.
The contest runs from today (November 27) through Cyber Monday (December 2), according to a McDonald’s press release. To enter it, fans must tweet two menu items they want delivered and include the following tags: #McDelivery, #Sweepstakes, @McDonalds and @UberEats. The grand prize is one year of free late-night delivery awarded as an Uber Eats promo code, along with a bundle of weird McDonald’s swag that includes, among many other items, a massage chair. An additional 50 winners will get a Late-Night Weekender Bag with a $20 Uber Eats promo code.
That’s a lot of burgers and fries, but in the bigger picture, this contest — like many other recent QSR promo efforts — isn’t about free swag or even free food. It’s about McDonald’s and Uber Eats finding new ways to brand themselves in a restaurant industry that’s increasingly moving online. Delivery and pickup orders placed via apps and websites are only going to increase over the next decade, particularly as a younger generation raised in a connected world comes of age. Sweepstakes like this one are as old as the QSR concept itself. McDonald’s and others are simply tweaking the concept to meet their audiences online, where they have the greatest chance of boosting brand loyalty.
More importantly, social media-based contests like these give QSRs more access to data on customer preferences. Having fans tweet the food items they want delivered late at night is, after all, a pretty clear-cut way to determine what people are ordering in the after hours. (Though AI does a pretty decent job of that, too.)
For Uber Eats, enticing more potential delivery customers is key, as the service’s longstanding exclusive contract with McDonald’s ended in July when the chain brought on DoorDash and Grubhub as additional delivery partners. And with customer loyalty to any one delivery platform not particularly loyal right now, these companies need every method they can get their hands on in order to keep existing customers firmly entrenched in their own ecosystems. I doubt contests basically giving away food and free massage chairs will be the strangest efforts we see as this trend continues to take hold.
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