Magic Stories transforms your every trip to McDonald's into a small piece of magic: a personalized story generated from a family's own moments, paired with illustrations in a magical visual world.
THE CHALLENGE
In Netherlands as McDonald's is already part of family routines, but routines can become transactional. The challenge was to create a repeatable experience that adds emotional value to visits, drives return behavior, and works naturally across channels, without feeling like another campaign that people try once and forget.
THE INSIGHT
Every visit to McDonald's has a story behind it. For families, the most valuable part of a meal is shared time. Small rituals are what make that time memorable. If we could create a ritual families genuinely want to repeat, the brand would earn frequency through meaning, not messaging.
THE IDEA
Introducing Magic Stories, the world's first AI storytelling engine built into a loyalty app. Magic Stories turns a family's visit history into a personal story universe, where the heroes are always the family members and every chapter is unique to them.
Using large language models and real-time loyalty data, we designed an ongoing experience where each visit becomes a new chapter in a never-ending epic. The more you visit, the more your story grows, building a personal library families can return to anytime.
We launched Magic Stories with McDonald's Netherlands as a pilot to explore a new role for AI storytelling inside the family loyalty program, and to prove that loyalty can be built through shared moments, not just rewards.
— You're invited to create your
own story
— Unlocks a new chapters in your family's epic
— Your family story grows on each meal.
DESIGN, DATA AND TECHNOLOGY
Magic Stories combines structured prompting, content guardrails, and a modular illustration system to deliver high-quality stories quickly and consistently. The experience is designed for real family journeys: time-poor moments, mobile-first use, and seamless continuity across dine-in, drive-thru, and delivery.
To ensure safe, unique, and magical stories every time, we fine-tuned our own LLM to generate modular narratives and paired it with a fine-tuned diffusion model using LoRA to create an immersive and safe visual world. Working closely with McDonald's legal team, we ensured the models were designed and governed in a way that prevents potential risks.
MADE IN FINLAND
Magic Stories started in a TBWA\Helsinki-led workshop, where the core idea was born and the experience concept was shaped from the ground up by the Finnish team. The experience was then designed and developed in Finland end-to-end, with the McDonald's app integrations implemented in the Netherlands.
RESULTS
