McDonalds CMO Mary Dillon on Music and Authenticity

The official Day 1 of MPlanet was excellent. You can see some pics and a complete wrap up on the MPlanet Blog. At lunchtime Mary Dillon, the global CMO for McDonald's sat with a small group of invited bloggers (will put up the list of bloggers this morning at some point) to chat, learn and discuss what we wanted to know and what we could add to her experience at MPlanet. The conversation waved from moms and health issues to transparency in their subjects to McDonald's view on Social Media and where they stand.

I tried to focus around Gen-Y and youth culture and thought going the music and authenticity route was a good way to get a conversation brewing. My question in a nut shell was

"how does McDonald's deal with authenticity in music for their commercials?"

Mary came back saying that McDonald's has moved away from celebrities in the U.S. to push their products because they don't have to anymore. She also noted that they search for undiscovered talent and use an agency, Leo Burnett, to discover and develop relationships with that talent.

Check out our video below and then 2 commercials Mary showed us during her keynote that deal with subjects from my question.







I hope you guys enjoy and I do want to thank Mary for granting some amazing bloggers and thinkers her time to chat with us and discover that blogging is an influential way to get their word out.

More from MPlanet coming soon!

-Greg Rollett
(I apologize to those that sent in questions via Twitter, we ran out of time quickly but I did use some of them to form the basis of my question and some of the authenticity issues that came up in general conversation covered some of the questions as well - I will get the full video up sometime this week as well so you can see that and dissect it!)