McDonald's Hong Kong turned its old Ronald benches into a citywide game

McDonald's Hong Kong turned 50 in 2024, and its most beloved relic was the Ronald McDonald bench — the store seating that had quietly disappeared from the city. When the last one surfaced at a Shek Wai Kok store, netizens flocked to photograph it and petitioned to keep it.

For the anniversary, DDB Group Hong Kong and OMD placed 50 of those benches across 50 iconic locations, each chosen to tell a chapter of the brand's relationship with the city — from the 1976 Star Ferry stunt to the first 24-hour outlet.

The benches became a physical time machine, but the campaign then made them a game: scanning a bench's QR code in the McDonald's app collected a stamp unique to that location, unlocking fun facts and entries into a prize pool of over 500,000 giveaways.

Collecting all 50 stamps turned Hong Kong into a giant O2O treasure hunt, forcing people to revisit neighborhoods and memories they had not thought about in decades — and to do it inside the McDonald's app.