Challenge

Find a way to raise child literacy amongst McDonald’s UK customer base, in response to a report showing one third of children don’t own a book and half of them don’t enjoy reading.

Solution

McDonald’s Happy Readers
A reading platform, in partnership with the Natural Literacy Trust, WHSmith’s and Kobo, that turned the Happy Meal into an educational tool. We replaced the Happy Meal toys with fun, educational books given away with every purchase. As well as vouchers and £1 deal offers that could be exchanged for fiction and non-fiction books, including paper and e-book classics by Dorling Kindersley and Enid Blyton.

Results

Since smashing targets at the launch in 2013, the platform has gone from strength to strength with McDonald’s continuing to commit to the cause but now on a global scale. In Europe alone, more than 102 million physical and digital books found their way into the hands of children and 80% of adults surveyed also agreed that McDonald’s was helping to make reading fun. Happy Readers has gone on tour, become more interactive with the launch of a companion app and has continued to engage numerous authors from Roald Dahl to David Walliams and Tom Fletcher.