The Sting Remix — McDonald's Australia

McDonald's in Australia has a different kind of brand problem. Awareness isn't the issue — everyone knows Macca's. The challenge is keeping a brand that's everywhere from feeling like it's nowhere in particular. Familiarity, unchecked, becomes wallpaper.

The insight was that the brand didn't need to manufacture relevance — it needed to borrow it. By remixing the iconic theme from The Sting into a piece of music built around McDonald's, the campaign created an earworm that spread because people wanted to share it, not because they were prompted to. It felt like culture, not like advertising.

My role was leading the cultural strategy: identifying the tension that made the idea necessary, shaping the brief that gave the creative room to move, and defining the guardrails that kept the execution feeling surprising rather than engineered.