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Since 2018, franchisee Christina Richter has kept beehives on the roof of her McDonald's restaurants. In 2019, we used McDonald's size to spread and scale up the initiative.
To create news value, we built a fully functioning hive in the form of a miniature McDonald's restaurant. Attention to detail was key since the Internet does not love McDonald’s, but it can’t resist liking and sharing really, really cute things. Thanks to "McHive", the initiative went from being noticed in local press to becoming trending news all over the world. In order to get more McDonald’s franchisees to support the initiative, we created a system where they can order outdoor ads that are also bee hotels. At the same time, we started a pilot project together with JC Decaux to house wild bees on the back of their outdoor billboards.
The story got worldwide publicity on news sites such as Fox News, Metro, The Independent, New YorkPost and The Standard. Lifestyle magazines and sites such as High Snobiety, Hypebeast, It’s nice that, Now This, People, MSN, Buzzfeed and TV shows in theUS, Russia & Asia. In total the McHive story received 6 billion possible impressions in over 80 countries and the billboard bee hotels got over 360million impressions. Both initiatives have grown locally and is now being discussed by McDonald’s globally.
