Dive Brief:
- McDonald’s Sweden and Soundtrack Your Brand, a music streaming service backed by Spotify, released a feature in the restaurant chain’s mobile app to quiz diners on music trivia while they eat, The Drum reported. BeatQuiz is an augmented reality (AR) game that generates multiple-choice questions based on the background music playing in restaurants.
- McDonald’s customers use their iOS or Android phones to the play game, compete with friends or try to score the most points on daily leaderboards. BeatQuiz provides additional entertainment for customers, said Ulf Persson, head of digital customer experiences at McDonald’s Sweden.
- BeatQuiz was developed by Soundtrack Labs, a collaboration between ad agency DDB Worldwide and Stockholm-based Soundtrack Your Brand, which specializes in creating playlists for businesses. Its clients include Aesop, TAG Heuer, Wagamama, Joe & Juice and GANT.
Dive Insight:
As restaurants and retailers search for ways to create experiences that differentiate their brands from online competitors, mobile apps that interact with the surroundings via AR may help to get people into stores. Connecting AR to music adds another layer of appeal as listening to music is one of the most popular activities on smartphones. “BeatQuiz lets McDonald's guests engage with what's going on in the physical restaurant by creating an interactive digital layer on top of the restaurant space in a way that is entertaining, engaging and scalable,” Joel Brosjö, Soundtrack Your Brand’s chief of experience, told The Drum.
The BeatQuiz feature provides another way for McDonald’s to promote downloads of its app while enhancing its dining experience in Sweden, where smartphone ownership is almost universal, according to The Drum. McDonald’s Sweden and Soundtrack Your Brand worked together in 2014 to create streamed playlists for its restaurants, but the new smartphone quiz adds a greater element of mobile interactivity to the dining experience.
McDonald’s, the biggest restaurant operator in the Nordic region with 435 locations in Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark, is looking for ways to distinguish its brand from local hamburger chains like Max Burgers and Friends & Brgrs, according to Business Insider Nordic. British financier Guy Hands, the head of Terra Firma Capital Partners, bought all of McDonald’s Scandinavian restaurants in January and is looking to expand the franchise, the Wall Street Journal reported.
