McDonald's M-Hub – Distributed Marketing made simple!

M.K.: We combine our strengths as a leading software and technology provider with technical and creative expertise to help our customers achieve three key objectives: 1. shorter time-to-market 2. easier customization and 3. more agility in decentralized brand management - while maintaining brand consistency. This is not only about optimizing communication in marketing, but also in sales or service. Digitas Pixelpark has the right customers to bring out the full benefits of our publishing and media management solutions: Large corporations and international brands with complex marketing organizations such as McDonald's.

J.J.: In order to support the business of McDonald's franchise partners and their local store marketing, we developed the M-Hub marketing portal, which, in addition to customizable promotions and advertising materials, provides all knowledge about franchising and enables real-time communication between franchisees and their target groups, including social media.

The integrated publishing and media management solution one2edit, from partner BRANDGUARDIAN, is an essential component in the implementation of promotions and advertising material. With the help of the BRANDGUARDIAN wizard, McDonald's business partners can easily generate individual advertising materials such as posters, displays, coupons, coupon booklets and signage and adapt them to their regional and local needs, directly from the browser. Thanks to integrated templates, image database and stored linking logic, the results are 100 percent CI-compliant and immediately ready for production, whether for print or digital. A previously created "proof of concept" had proven the performance and enormous savings potential of the solution and the portal.

M.K.: Correct. All adjustments of the advertising material are done intuitively via one2edit and our marketing adaptation wizard. You can simply click together the means of communication. This brings an incredible boost in operational terms: after all, around 90 percent of the more than 1,500 McDonald's restaurants in Germany are run by independent franchise partners. Behind this are smart templates with countless media links and clever rules and regulations. Thanks to these, new posters, displays, coupon booklets etc. can be individually created on site with just a few clicks - always 100% compliant with the current corporate design. The wizard technically uses the one2edit™ programming interface (api) to edit InDesign documents and to provide an up-to-date preview. As soon as a means of communication has been configured with the Wizard, it is ready for production. A final artwork is no longer necessary. The Wizard offers almost no creative freedom, but nevertheless a large number of variations for the presentation of the products.  This is exactly the added value: non-professionals - without knowing the design rules - can parameterize a design/layout based on easy-to-answer questions. The content structure (what content should/must be displayed) and the associated graphic elements allow a specific layout to be created without dtp knowledge, which is immediately ready for printing.

J.J.: Digital platforms that make marketing and sales communication more successful and that ensure more agility, faster processes, cost savings and autonomy for our customers are THE future for brand owners and franchise companies.

M.K.: But also for subsidiaries such as car dealerships, marketers in local offices, translation service providers or copywriters in the agency: Every user can easily create marketing materials with our solution based on the stored rules and previously professionally designed templates and images. And who knows if the locally required clicks can be carried out by an AI in a few years. Then brand management would indeed be automated end-to-end and hyperautomation, known by Gartner as the hot topic of the future, would be there.