The NFL’s decision to add an extra week of games to its season beginning in 2021 pushed the Super Bowl further into February, bumping it closer to Valentine’s Day. Not everyone has been thrilled with this, but McDonald’s is embracing it this year—using both occasions together to launch a new love-themed campaign.

It began Sunday night with a 30-second spot that aired right before kickoff on Fox’s Super Bowl telecast. (McDonald’s has had this pre-kick slot for several years.) The commercial, by Wieden+Kennedy New York, features eight real-life couples, including the rappers Cardi B and Offset, talking about their favorite McDonald’s orders.

Knowing your partner’s order, the spot suggests, is a true sign of love. And if you don’t know their order, well, that speaks volumes too.

The spot is just a table-setter, though. On Tuesday, the chain will break a second ad for Valentine’s Day—this one much more focused on Cardi B and Offset, seen on a fantasy date night. That same day, the chain will announce that their date-night order will be coming to McDonald’s restaurants across the country—the first celebrity-couple meal in the chain’s ongoing “Famous Meals” initiative.

Tariq Hassan, chief marketing officer at McDonald’s, told Ad Age the idea to focus on love and couples didn’t emerge from a Valentine’s Day brief. Rather, it was prompted more by the Super Bowl and the chain's ongoing process of mining insights and truths about its customers.

“We were thinking about what to do for Super Bowl,” he said. “We started poking around with—what is the relationship with McDonald's and love in the modern day with this youth culture? Is there something to that?”

What they found was a slew of connection points.

“In a group outing [to McDonald’s], maybe there's a crush in the crowd that you're having lunch with,” Hassan said. “Or there’s someone you took there on a date when you were younger. We've got stories of people coming through the drive-thru in their wedding gowns. We found a depth of insights with love and relationships that we think we can have fun with.”

Knowing their order

The two new spots, along with the latest meal, show McDonald’s current strategy in action—which is stridently “fan-first,” Hassan said, even as the company enlists celebrities for cultural buzz among Gen Z.

Take the pre-game commercial, which is called “Knowing Their Order.” It establishes Cardi B and Offset as a regular couple, filmed no differently than everyone else. This positions them as McDonald’s fans first, establishing credibility ahead of phase two of the campaign.

“We’re not working with them because they’re celebrities,” Hassan said. “Every meal we've done—much to the chagrin of my supply and operations guys at times—it’s actually the meal they would have ordered.”

The rest of the spot reflects another core tenet for McDonald’s—a commitment to diversity. The ad’s representation is notable, even by today’s more progressive industry standards. The spot features people of color, a gay couple, a couple with Down syndrome, an elderly couple and a Hispanic couple speaking Spanish.

“I’m proud to say it’s becoming part of the fabric of how we do things,” Hassan said. “You can't have a core focus on multicultural youth and not reflect their reality. They reflect the diversification of this country. Not by categories, not by labels—lord knows this generation doesn't use labels—but by the fact of who they are. And we're one of the most democratized brands out there. When 90% of the country comes through your doors every year, you have to reflect it.” 

Finally, the filmmaking style is also, in its own way, inclusive. The muted colors, the retro-tinged sets and backdrops, the lightly vintage wardrobing—it all allows the target to see more of themselves, and less of the brand, in the work.

Celebrities as creators

While “Knowing Their Order” captures one side of today’s McDonald’s brand, the upcoming celebrity spot and the new meal embody another.

McDonald’s and W+K helped start the whole celeb-meal trend, which has grown immensely popular across the category. A Super Bowl pregame spot in 2020 introduced the idea of “Famous Meals,” and the Travis Scott meal arrived that September. (Saweetie, BTS and J Balvin would get their own meals eventually.) But it’s not a hired-gun approach. To maintain the celebs-as-fans authenticity, the brand encourages its endorsers to take part in the creative process. 

For Cardi B and Offset, this meant getting involved in the look of the Valentine’s Day spot, as well as the design of the meal itself.

“We never come in with a fully baked concept. We brought them in early to develop it with us,” Hassan said. “The Valentine’s ad is sort of Cardi's fun vision of a night out with Offset. They're involved from the conceptualization of what we're doing to the packaging, the script on the packaging, the name of it, and then the order itself.”

The success of the “Famous Meals” is self-perpetuating, too. McDonald’s has seen more celebs want to engage with the brand, much as athletes would clamor to be in ESPN’s “This is SportsCenter” campaign.

“As I said to my team, ‘We’ve called culture. Guess what? Culture's calling back,’” Hassan said. “When you have Adele saying her last meal would be McDonald’s, you're in the zeitgeist. Now the question is, how do you stay in it so it doesn't look like you tried to buy your way in but you actually have an authentic relationship with it?’”

Coming this May: The BTS Meal pic.twitter.com/iarw2gYMsx

— McDonald's (@McDonalds) April 19, 2021

To Hassan, this isn’t so different from when he worked in sports with brands such as Gatorade. “Those athletes already had a relationship with the brand,” he said. “It's the same here. Then you can develop things together, which is what we’ve done.” 

Spreading the love in digital and experiential

The new campaign will also live in digital and IRL activations. There will be a “truth or dare” game inside the McDonald’s app; a kissing booth in Times Square, where couples will be photographed and their images transmitted to a digital billboard; partnerships with TikTok and (of course) Tinder; and special packaging for the meal itself. The idea is to be everywhere Gen Z is.

“The design of the meal picks up on the whimsy of Valentine’s, but also on the whimsy of Cardi and Offset's relationship,” Hassan said. “And watch them, too, because they're going to be really engaged from a social perspective.” 

As the campaign rolls out in the coming weeks, McDonald’s will be looking at sales of the meal, of course, but also at metrics such as store traffic and brand sentiment.

“There are a lot of brand metrics in terms of connectivity and culture and relevance,” Hassan said. “It’s not purely on the sales of the [celebrity] meal, because what we’ve seen is the meal creates excitement and engagement. You may come in and decide, hey, good for Cardi and Offset, that's their meal. This is mine. Which is great.” 

They’ll be closely monitoring how Gen Z responds, too, Hassan said.

“We’re looking at how we're continuing to grow share and penetration with that younger audience, which we've seen now year over year,” he said, adding that diverse communities are “also really important to our business. We don't even really talk general market anymore. We literally will run our metrics by all the different communities and see how we're doing in there and how they respond.” 

One metric that may be tougher to measure?

“I suspect there'll be a few folks in trouble for not knowing their partners' orders,” Hassan joked.