When last we heard from McDonald’s, the fast food giant had hired former top Ogilvy planner Colin Mitchell to serve as its brand VP.
This news came less than two months after WPP dropped out of the ongoing McDonald’s creative review. And while the holding company declined to elaborate on why it no longer wanted to participate, we feel like it may have had something to do with rumors regarding McD’s demands on its agencies.
Not to rehash, but the claims held that McD’s contracts insisted that its future agency partners had to operate at cost without making any sort of profits until they achieved certain unspecified performance goals. A later AdAge article claimed that the agencies had also been asked to create ideas based on multiple briefs and that the client’s conflict clause was stricter than usual.
The deadline for the two-month pitch was June 30. We know that Leo Burnett made its final presentation on that day (a Thursday), and so far we’ve heard nothing from McDonald’s.
According to one tipster, this is because the company has delayed the conclusion of the review, extending its decision period to two months. Given the 60-day turnaround, that would mean that the client now has the same amount of time to make its decision as it gave its competing agencies to pitch the business and that the news will come at the end of August/beginning of September.
Today a McDonald’s spokesperson told us that there was no news to share because the review is ongoing and did not indicate a potential date for the announcement. Again, we can’t definitively say that our sources are correct. But McDonald’s has not specifically denied any of the information we have published so far regarding the review.
Updates to come, of course.