Breakfast at McDonald’s

A few months ago I saw a series of interesting Ikea HK TV commercials on YouTube, and lately when we’re looking for a director for one of our projects I remember of those commercials and browsed the production house’s website.

I found another commercial by another director, done for McDonald’s campaign here in Indonesia (by Leo Burnett Jakarta) whom I happened to miss to see on TV. It’s for the newest McDonald’s breakfast menu which serves from 5 to 11 am.

I saw the print campaign 6 months ago and was interested to give it a try, and having seen the beautifully filmed commercial again I decided to try it this morning. The Sausage McMuffin with eggs was delicious. I ordered it without the coffee, of course, since my heart is a bit sensitive to it.

At the end of the TV commercial, after the guy finishes ordering the meal and goes to the dining table he meets a girl. It feels strangely funny that after I finished ordering my meal and go to the dining table, I met a girl. She seems like from a post-graduate campus near my office building. Suddenly I wanted to sing the commercial song’s chorus, “Oh bahagiaaa…” which means “Oh how happyyy…”

I used to advertise telco

And used to like some telco brands that can speak positive messages about the need to communicate. This is a category I today still believe can be those channels that shape society.

Sales-wise, though, I feel guilty to discover that my Dad is a victim of telco ads. I understand that in his sales business it will help to have more than two phone numbers, but to have 10 (or more) seems to be out of line. Let’s say a phone number bills about IDR 100k monthly, 10 numbers will bill around IDR 1 million monthly even if you use less than it seems (the post-paid charges subscription fee for small use, the pre-paid has expiry date). And that is all before the money spent on buying the handsets, which my father proudly showed me the 3-in-1 IDR 500k handset that even our housemaid hardly had any interest buying herself one.

He complained when I decided to deactivate one of my mobile phone, the CDMA that barely had any signal when I was working at 25^th floor, since it was one of the cheapest channel to communicate long-distance. He was also one of the first who use (and advocated to his friends) CDMA when Telkom first tested it in Surabaya in 2000 as C-Phone—before they renamed it as Flexi—and he could cope on dialing without phonebook since neither he nor I found an easy way to memorize the numbers in StarTac handset, the only handset available during that first year. And he could also tolerate the often bad signal that even I as the non-using surrounding couldn’t stand hearing him saying too many hellos.

Now that I no longer advertise telco and no longer read the details of the offer, and use it as much as I need to use it and don’t use it as long as I don’t need to, it is him who get me updated whenever there is a new promo for the operator we use. And it starts to spread to credit card promos.

Once I tried to lend and buy him some books so he would rather spend his time on reading more valuable information. It’s a sign I should try harder.

Lesson on efficiency

To know efficiency is to understand that inefficiency is spending too little to make a difference—which is more like a waste than a spending.

Two and a half years ago I was in the middle of making no new campaigns except half a dozen of tag-ons, terms for a 5-second bumper placed on an end of a thematic TV commercial, which I never heard before. So on the sixth or seventh attempt, I decided it was enough and told my team that it would have been more and more waste of effort to have only 5 seconds of the new information and 25 seconds of the old one—people would not have noticed and switched the channel before the tag-on showed up. Media-wise, it would have also been ridiculous to save money on production (a tag-on production can cost as little as 10 to 5% of a new promo TV commercial, which was around IDR 350 million) while paying 30 second spot to place only 5 seconds of the new information. Besides, how much do you expect to say in just 5 seconds?

Somehow the team agreed and my Account Director managed to convince the client to produce a new 15 second campaign instead. More portion of the fresh information, more room for creativity, and I assume more placements with the same media spending. The campaign was a success, and creative-wise it was named finalist in an annual advertising festival. But soon after that my brilliant Account Director left, my Creative Group Head and my writer were assigned to another account… and while the promo returned the next year the client decided to reuse the old ad with just revised few frames on the promo period and prizes.

I didn’t know how the result was, since I finally moved to another account not long after finishing production. I hope it went well, but if it didn’t they had been warned.