McDonald's online marketing with children's games

McDonald's Children's website McWorld Beijing time April 21 Noon news, the McDonald's Children's website McWorld recently began to provide children with character creation, tree house dress up and virtual world exploration and other fun games, the move is aimed at strengthening brand marketing. The new game offered by McDonald's is a novel online marketing approach, with French fries, hamburgers, and apple pie in the children's game, with the main goal of making it a natural way for children to connect their brands to happiness.　　This mode of advertising is different from the 30-second TV spots and the embedded ads in the movie. "McDonald's online marketing represents the future," said Mark Smale, senior vice president of Creata, a McWorld website designer, Australia. Smale said they realised that the best strategy to build lasting emotional relationships with children on the online platform was to give up the idea of immediate product sales. "This will make users feel that we are not selling products clearly, and if that is the case, the users you want to attract will not be interested in your service and they will not be involved," he said.　　"McDonald's is a marketing approach called participatory marketing (engagement-based marketing), which has become an important tool for business marketing to children." However, critics point out that this kind of marketing is a kind of unfair behavior that manipulates children who don't know the truth.　　McWorld and other food sites have content that encourages children to buy, and McWorld's role creation requires the child to enter the code on the Happy Meal (Happy meals) box.　　Catherine Montgomery, a communications professor at the University of America, Kathryn Montgomery The marketing approach to young people, saying that it would be more honest if McWorld used McDonald's food to lay out their children's games, at least the outside world would know their intentions.　　The modern way of marketing, says Catherine, is to integrate the brand into children's play, to make friends and interact with brands, to connect children to their friends in a branded environment, but ultimately to sell products. Catherine does not agree that children cannot distinguish between entertainment and online marketing.　　McDonald's spokeswoman, Hither Odani Heather Oldani, said McDonald's has more than 50 years of experience communicating with young customers, who follow their own strategies to understand the right clients. "The standards that the industry requires and our self-discipline standards are very high, and they are consistent with our brand marketing philosophy, whether it's online marketing or traditional advertising," says Heather.　"Smale says that if the sole purpose of the site is to sell food to children, this marketing approach is undesirable, but it is acceptable to join the game or other forms of entertainment.　He believes that the extent to which companies will be able to do online marketing depends largely on their ability to impress their children, who have now learned to skim over television commercials, a tactic that proves that the way in which commercials are embedded in entertainment is difficult to succeed. (Xiao Ming)