It’s not often that a brand is OK with customers coughing up its product.

But thanks to a long-standing partnership, and a bit of bravery, Wieden+Kennedy was able to do just that for McDonald’s.

Last June, McDonald’s rolled out a birthday meal for Grimace, continuing to lean into nostalgic marketing and release a variation on its celebrity meals. The Grimace Birthday Meal campaign conjured images of childhood birthdays at a McDonald’s PlayPlace. It consisted of a choice of a Big Mac or 10-piece McNuggets with fries and a berry-flavored purple milkshake.

The drink sparked an absurdist, mini-horror movie-like TikTok trend. Customers would take a sip of the shake, then the video would quickly cut to them passing out or slumped against the wall, some coughing or sputtering up the drink. The trend led to a huge boost in sales, so much so that McDonald’s ran out of the milkshakes before the campaign ended, according to W+K.

“When we first started with McDonald’s, they were hesitant to be themselves and had been listening to the haters since the ‘Super Size Me’ documentary,” said Brandon Henderson, co-chief creative officer at W+K New York. “I think the big shift we gave them was to stop listening to the haters and listen to the fans.”

The Grimace shake idea came from two insights, according to Karl Lieberman, W+K’s global chief creative officer. First was the nostalgia of McDonald’s birthdays and the second was that customers can actually order a special-occasion sheet cake from McDonald’s. Churning out several sheet cakes a day was not logistically possible, so the agency landed on the idea of a milkshake. 

“We didn’t come up with an ad, it was an actual menu item,” said Lieberman. “That to me is the sweet spot, and we want to keep doing more of that.”

On the heels of Grimace, W+K came up with the “As Featured in Meal,” which rounded up clips from various movies and TV shows where the Golden Arches was referenced.

“I think that was the most difficult assignment to come out of McDonald’s,” said Henderson. “The amount of hoops that our legal team, business affairs and production teams had to go through—but we are so proud of that spot. And it fulfilled a dream of mine to get ‘Seinfeld’ into a commercial.”

“Year after year, Wieden+Kennedy New York delivers ideas that transcend mere advertising; they provide culture-driving insights that put our brand in culture time and time again. We consistently see this creative excellence move our business forward in unexpected ways, and our work with WKNY has been central to that,” said Tariq Hassan, chief marketing and customer experience officer at McDonald’s USA.

Creative expansion

It may be odd to think of a milkshake as an ad, but every person Ad Age spoke to at W+K remarked on how the idea of what can be considered a piece of creative has exploded. 

“This year we saw a continued acceleration of this thing that started a few years ago where work began taking so many different shapes now,” said Lieberman. “I continue to be surprised in how the work shows up in the world, be it social posts or TikToks, long-form content.” 

“We don’t know what the thing is until it happens,” said Henderson. “If you are trying to make culture, you start a bunch of little fires and see what happens.”

W+K has also seen internal growth. Despite losing TurboTax and Duracell, the agency last year brought in 13 new clients, including CeraVe, Eli Lilly, Tiffany and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee. The agency’s social-first creative studio, Bodega, has grown to 41 global employees, and its 2023 revenue doubled from the year prior.

“I think there has been a dramatic shift in what it means to be a global agency,” said Neal Arthur, W+K’s CEO. “Ten years ago it was about servicing clients in lots of places with lots of assets. Now, it’s much more about the idea itself and social media has made it less about the infrastructure.”

That’s not to say that Wieden has not had growing pains: Late last month it laid off 20% of its Portland staff. “We’ve gotten to a place in Portland where we need to make changes to align better with how our clients work,“ the agency said in a statement explaining the decision.

W+K also became B Corp certified, a process that was spearheaded by Luke Purdy, an account manager who became the agency’s first director of social impact in 2022 and is now director of sustainability. Since then, the agency has reduced its global emissions by 16%.

W+K’s Head of Production Nick Setounski created a digital tool to track data on gender, race and sexual orientation of production partners for each of its projects for clients. In 2022, more than half of its projects valued over $1 million in New York were directed by women and nearly 40% of all McDonald’s projects were directed by people of color. The agency has also added a four-year partnership with Howard University to pay for the final year of one rising senior, and give that person a paid internship after graduation.

Girl power

Outside of McDonald’s, W+K also came up with campaigns for Ford and Nike featuring actress Sydney Sweeney and the U.S. women’s national soccer team.

While working on a Ford brief, the agency learned that Sweeney was an organic fan of the automaker, restoring her own vintage Bronco and Mustang. 

“Historically, Ford has such a legacy around the company,” said Jiah Choi, president of W+K New York. “But we shifted the focus to the customers and who is actually driving Fords today.”

W+K created a TikTok tutorial series called Auto 101 with Sweeney showing fans how to check their tire pressure, oil levels and jump-start a dead battery. The videos got 15 million views.

The series led to a collaboration with Dickies to create a female-inspired apparel line that sold out in 24 hours. (The work was part of a larger multichannel campaign for Ford that included other agencies.)

For Nike, W+K created campaigns for the National Women’s Soccer League. The 2023 season was very unpredictable, with over 700 possible playoff scenarios leading into the final weeks of the season. W+K felt the season was dramatic enough to be nominated for a Golden Globes Best Drama Television Series (the award went to “Succession”).

In the run-up to last year’s Women’s World Cup, W+K also created a campaign to highlight 11 global soccer players, including Megan Rapinoe, Ada Herderberg and Sam Kerr. According to Kevin Steele and Pedro Izique, creative directors at W+K Portland, the ad was shot in three different locations around the world with three directors, four editors and three photographers to bring together eight separate campaigns.