McDonald’s $80,000 Twitter Ad Spend That Failed

Yet another Twitter ad purchase has gone awry for mega-fast food chain McDonald’s. Today the company purchased two promoted trends: #ANewMcDFavorite and #LoveMcDsSmoothies. The hashtags themselves appear pretty innocuous, and they’re promoting a new fun, summer smoothie. However, the Twitterverse wasn’t so happy to hear from everyone’s favorite yellow arches, and the backlash makes me wonder whether the $80,000+ ad spend was worth it.

Earlier today, #ANewMcDFavorite was trending on Twitter, and folks weren’t too happy about it. The purpose of the campaign was likely to get people talking about the new McDonald’s smoothie, but not with negativity. Check out some of the tweets below for a sample (a very representative one) of the reaction this campaign received:

And now, McDonald’s has switched up the trending topic to #LoveMcDsSmoothies, and the results aren’t much better. People are jumping on this promoted trend to talk about how unhealthy the sugar-laden drinks are, or to denigrate McDonald’s more generally.

And since Promoted Trends can cost anywhere between $80,000 and $100,000 for just 24 hours, this is one chunk of change that was probably misspent.

However, McDonald’s doesn’t seem to really have a problem with people speaking negatively about their products on Twitter. Back in November, they purchased a Promoted Trend for the McRib, and received much the same bashing from Twitter users. At that time, they basically shrugged their shoulders and got in line with the philosophy that any press is good press, even when it’s bad.

I wonder what they’re thinking about their floundering smoothie campaign this time around, though?

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