It can be risky to go minimalist in an ad campaign: what if your audience miss the point entirely and don’t realise who the ad is for? Yet McDonald’s has created a series of outdoor ads in recent years that have boldly expressed just how deeply the fast food brand is embedded in our collective consciousness.

These have included using the Golden Arches to point the way in a set of ads from McDonald’s Canada, and a series of elegant, minimal ads from the French market, such as these charming, rain-soaked photographs to promote McDelivery.

Joining these are a new series of posters from Leo Burnett for McDonald’s UK, which abandon photographs of juicy burgers or crisp fries and instead simply opt for words. Surely an ad creative’s delight to work on, the posters prove that we need no more than text to get us feeling peckish. The campaign was created in collaboration with renowned typographer David Schwen, and clearly hark back to Schwen’s earlier series titled Type Sandwiches.

“McDonald’s is a leader,” says Pete Heyes, Creative Director at Leo Burnett. “Only a handful of global brands can communicate like this. The redacted and graphic nature of this latest campaign exudes the confidence McDonald’s and its iconic products deserve.” It’s hard to disagree.

Credits:
Agency: Leo Burnett
CCO: Chaka Sobhani
Creative Director: Pete Heyes
Art Director: James Millers
Copywriter: Andrew Long
Designers: Jake Arnold, David Schwen
Head Of Design: Phil Bosher