Brief:

• McDonald's is giving Twitter users a chance to win free late-night food delivery for a year from Uber Eats with a social media contest around Thanksgiving. To enter the sweepstakes Nov. 27 to Dec. 2 (Cyber Monday), fans must tweet two menu items they want delivered and include the #McDelivery, #Sweepstakes, @McDonalds and @UberEats tags, according to an announcement shared with Mobile Marketer.
• The grand prize consists of an Uber Eats promo code redeemable for up to $20 credit on 365 orders, along with a kit of branded merchandise and $2,000 to help cover taxes, per the contest rules. McDonald's and Uber Eats also are awarding 50 additional winners with its Late-Night Weekender Bag that includes a $20 Uber Eats promo code and branded swag.
• As part of the campaign, the fast food chain is promoting delivery from Uber Eats by nixing fees during the contest period. To order from McDonald's, customers who don't have the Uber Eats app can download it from Apple's App Store or Google Play.

Insight:

McDonald's and Uber Eats are collaborating on another promotion to reach a target audience of younger adults who are most likely to use social media and be familiar with delivery apps. While only 22% of the general U.S. population uses Twitter — where the promotion is mostly taking place — almost half (44%) of people ages 30 to 49 and about one-third (29%) of people ages 18 to 29 say they use the social network, per Pew Research Center. Twitter may benefit from the McDonald's and Uber Eats promotion as people use the app to enter the contest and extend the reach of the campaign via the hashtags. McDonald's has 3.6 million followers on the social network,while Uber Eats has 162,000, giving them more room for growth.

The McDonald's promotion indicates how important the fast food chain is to Uber Eats, which had been McDonald's exclusive delivery partner since early 2017. The chain this year added DoorDash and GrubHub service to give customers another choice for food delivery, which has become an increasingly cutthroat business. While explaining a 94% plunge in its Q3 profit from a year earlier, GrubHub said in a shareholder letter that online diners were becoming "more promiscuous," showing little loyalty to a single delivery platform. Recognizing the trends, Amazon last summer shut down its Amazon Restaurants food delivery service amid growing competition. Consumer willingness to shop around has led food-delivery companies to start subscription plans or to spend heavily on free-delivery promotions like the current Uber Eats and McDonald's one.

McDonald's has been active with delivery promotions in the past few years. Most recently, the burger chain teamed with DoorDash to celebrate the nationwide rollout of McDelivery with a sweepstakes and steep discounts on Big Macs. The promotion came two weeks after Uber Eats targeted McDonald's customers with an offer of free branded loungewear for those who placed an order at dinnertime.

Meanwhile, branded swag has also become a vital part of restaurant chains' promotional activities of late. McDonald's mocked the trend with an August effort in the U.K. for a parody line of streetwear. The company in 2015 created the Big Mac Lifestyle Collection that included a humorous "McWalk" fashion show in Stockholm. Other chains such as KFC and Taco Bell have hopped onto the trend with branded clothing lines aimed at attracting millennials and Gen Z.