These McDonald’s Egg McMuffin Videos Might Be the Most Satisfying Ads Ever Made
How TBWA\Paris turned breakfast into art
When McDonald’s all-day breakfast menu launched in France, the brand could have focused all its marketing efforts on convenience or craving or any number of other traditional approaches.
Instead, agency TBWA\Paris took things in a very different and delightful direction. The agency has created a series of content that plays right into a modern internet obsession with “satisfying” videos, a trend that’s often hard to describe except to say that, like a visual form of ASMR, they scratch an itch inside your brain.
Working with 3-D animator Matthieu Braccini, the agency—known for its other minimalist McDonald’s campaigns such as its impressionistic ads for McDelivery and its use of fries to offer directions to the nearest restaurant—created a series of GIFs that showed a fantasy interpretation of how Egg McMuffins are made.
Now Braccini has compiled his GIFs into one video and set them to music, making it easy to sit back and enjoy the show:
The GIFs, which won a Bronze Lion in Design at this year’s Cannes Lions, are housed on an Egg McMuffin microsite that celebrates “un monde de douceur,” or “a world of softness.” One post about the campaign on the McDonald’s France Facebook page generated 3.5 million impressions and 120,000 visits to the site, according to the agency.
On his Behance page, Braccini shares several images and animations about how the final videos were made, including this initial conceptual sketch:
For those who want to nerd out even further, here’s how the agency describes the process that led to the animations:
“We deconstructed the product and used its separated ingredients to create fifteen abstract allegoric 3D animations crafted with C4D and rendered in Redshift. Extra care was given to textures and physics, to properly convey the softness, roundness, smooth and silky aspect of the product. The choice of colors, materials, and overall art direction contributed to recreate an appetizing food environment. We chose infinite loops as a format to further enhance the soothing and hypnotizing effect of the animations, and built an experiential website to host them on both desktop and mobile, where design and user interaction is also aimed at constructing a smooth and playful digital universe.”
The coupled the GIFs with a spot that took the concept of “satisfying” visuals (now with equally pleasing and ASMR-quality audio) into the real world with “Un Moment de Douceur,” a moment of softness.
CREDITS:
Agency: TBWA\PARIS
Advertising Managers: Maurizio Biondi, Clémence Arnaud, Floriane Triacca
Agency Managers: Luc Bourgery, Marc Fraissinet, Agathe Bruneau, Priscilla Vaudevire
Executive Creative Directors: Benjamin Marchal and Faustin Claverie
Creative Director: Maud Poilpré
TV Producer: Mathilde Nanot-Lachkar
Production: TBWA\Else
CEO: Maxime Boiron
Director: Maud Poilpré
Digital:
Production: Line Georges, Pierre Rebourseau
Creative lead: Nicolas Barrès
Programmer: Kamal Zitouni
3D Illustrator: Matthieu Braccini
