How McDonald's Malaysia Turned a Melting Billboard Into a Mobile Game
McDonald's Malaysia launched Save the Sundae Cone in January 2014, an outdoor advertising activation created by Leo Burnett Kuala Lumpur that placed a giant animated melting sundae cone on a 200-foot LED billboard in Bukit Bintang, Kuala Lumpur, inviting passersby to rescue it by operating a virtual fan through a mobile website, with successful rescuers rewarded with free Sundae Cone e-vouchers redeemable at participating restaurants.
The campaign sits at the intersection of digital out-of-home media and mobile interactivity, treating a static billboard location as a live game environment. Rather than broadcasting a product message, the activation assigned the audience a task: keep the ice cream from melting. The mechanic was deliberately simple. A user visited a mobile site, activated a virtual fan, and their collective effort — combined with that of other participants — slowed the animated melt visible on the billboard above Bukit Bintang's busy commercial strip. The reward was immediate and tangible: a countdown-gated e-voucher for a complimentary cone, redeemable in-store.
In the Malaysian market, where Kuala Lumpur's urban density concentrates foot traffic and smartphone penetration was accelerating through 2014, the campaign was engineered to convert a public spectacle into a personal transaction. Technology partner PubNub provided the real-time synchronisation infrastructure that linked individual mobile inputs to the billboard display, while Arc Worldwide collaborated with Leo Burnett on the broader execution. The Bukit Bintang location — one of Kuala Lumpur's highest-footfall retail and entertainment corridors — was not incidental. It placed the activation in front of exactly the kind of mobile-first, food-curious urban audience McDonald's Malaysia needed to reach. Clapboard rates this campaign 78/100.
McDonald's Malaysia structured Save the Sundae Cone around a consumer insight that is both obvious and underexploited: a melting ice cream cone creates genuine, if minor, urgency. Leo Burnett Kuala Lumpur translated that instinctive response into a participatory mechanic, using urgency as the engine of engagement rather than simply a creative flourish. The brief, as the activation demonstrates, was less about awareness and more about converting ambient outdoor exposure into an in-store visit with a measurable voucher trail.
The strategic context in Malaysia in 2014 was one of intensifying quick-service restaurant competition. McDonald's faced pressure not only from global peers — Burger King was expanding its Malaysian footprint and KFC maintained deep brand loyalty in the market — but also from a consumer base growing more selective about how and where it spent discretionary food budgets. According to Euromonitor International, global consumer foodservice sales exceeded US$2.7 trillion in 2014, rising by roughly five percent year over year, reflecting a category that was expanding even as individual brands faced margin and traffic headwinds. As reported by industry analysts covering the QSR sector, McDonald's estimated systemwide sales declined approximately one percent in 2014, underscoring the need for activations that generated genuine store traffic rather than passive brand sentiment.
Against that backdrop, Save the Sundae Cone was engineered as a footfall driver. The e-voucher mechanic created a closed loop: billboard interaction produced a redemption code, the redemption code required a store visit, and the store visit produced a transaction. The Moving Minds Challenge, which awarded Leo Burnett Malaysia a Grand Prize including RM800,000 in airtime according to reporting, validated the campaign's premise before it reached the street. That pre-market endorsement gave the Bukit Bintang execution a degree of institutional confidence unusual for a single-site OOH activation.
Leo Burnett Kuala Lumpur built Save the Sundae Cone on a 200-foot LED billboard in Bukit Bintang, Kuala Lumpur, animating a sundae cone in a state of continuous melt visible to street-level audiences across one of Malaysia's busiest commercial intersections. The creative premise demanded technical precision: the billboard had to respond in real time to mobile inputs, making the connection between individual action and visible outcome legible at distance and at a glance.
Executive Creative Director Eric Cruz and Creative Director Iska Hashim led the creative development, with Creative Group Heads Eaide Jasli and Mukund Olety shaping the interactive mechanic. Digital Art Directors Pavel Flegl and Benjamin Encarnacion handled the visual language of the campaign, while Technical Director Reza Rosli oversaw the systems architecture that made the real-time billboard response possible. Flash Developer Delexander Lai and Content Engineer Loo Giap Ching built the mobile-side infrastructure, with Digital Designer Buboy Paguio completing the interface work. Agency Producer Iskander Siva managed production flow across the activation's components. Photography was handled by Staek Photography, and Directors Think Tank served as the production company on the project, as documented in campaign credits reported by Little Black Book and campaignbriefasia.com.
PubNub's real-time data infrastructure was the technical spine of the execution, synchronising fan inputs from individual mobile users with the animated state of the billboard cone. Project Manager Chan Lik Win coordinated the operational layer that kept the activation running across its 960 minutes of total airtime. The craft achievement here is not purely visual. It is the seamless compression of a multi-platform system — mobile site, real-time API, large-format LED display — into an experience that a passerby in Bukit Bintang could understand and act on within seconds of encountering it.
No independently verified third-party performance audit for Save the Sundae Cone is publicly available. The figures that have circulated in industry coverage — including 265 cones saved, approximately 1,825 coupons issued, at least 170 participants, and roughly five store visits per minute during the campaign's 960 minutes of airtime — originate from campaign-reported data as covered by lbbonline.com and campaignbriefasia.com, and should be read in that context rather than as audited results.
The award record provides a more independently verifiable measure of industry reception. The campaign won the Moving Minds Challenge Grand Prize in 2014, with Leo Burnett Malaysia receiving Gold and an RM800,000 airtime prize, as reported in industry coverage. It received a Bronze in Craft at the Kancil Awards 2014 in the Cyber and Mobile — Use of Technology category, and won the Grand Prix at the Malaysia Digital Association Awards 2014, where it was also recognised for Best Use of Digital Out-of-Home and Entertainment, according to award documentation cited by campaignbriefasia.com. At Cannes Lions 2014, the campaign was shortlisted in the Digital category under Product and Service — Retail, E-commerce and Restaurants, a shortlist position that reflects international creative peer recognition without a metal.
Structurally, the activation's effectiveness rests on the tightness of its incentive loop. A participant who engaged with the mobile site had a direct, time-pressured reason to visit a McDonald's Malaysia location. That design — urgency, action, immediate reward, store visit — is a coherent direct-response architecture applied to a format, the OOH billboard, that rarely operates at that level of transactional precision.
Save the Sundae Cone was a January 2014 outdoor advertising campaign by McDonald's Malaysia and Leo Burnett Kuala Lumpur. It placed a 200-foot animated LED billboard in Bukit Bintang, Kuala Lumpur, showing a melting sundae cone that mobile users could cool using a virtual fan, earning free Sundae Cone e-vouchers for successful rescues.
The billboard was located in Bukit Bintang, Kuala Lumpur. Bukit Bintang is one of the Malaysian capital's highest-footfall retail and entertainment districts, making it the strategic anchor for an activation designed to convert street-level pedestrian traffic into mobile participants and in-store McDonald's customers.
Leo Burnett Kuala Lumpur created Save the Sundae Cone for McDonald's Malaysia. Executive Creative Director Eric Cruz and Creative Director Iska Hashim led creative development. Arc Worldwide collaborated on the broader execution, and technology company PubNub provided the real-time infrastructure linking mobile user inputs to the LED billboard display.
Save the Sundae Cone won the Moving Minds Challenge Grand Prize and a Malaysia Digital Association Grand Prix in 2014. It also received a Bronze at the Kancil Awards in the Cyber and Mobile Use of Technology category and was shortlisted at Cannes Lions 2014 in Digital, as reported by campaignbriefasia.com.
Passersby visited a mobile website and activated a virtual fan directed at the animated melting sundae cone displayed on the Bukit Bintang LED billboard. Collective fan activity slowed the on-screen melt. Users who successfully contributed received a countdown-gated free Sundae Cone e-voucher redeemable at participating McDonald's Malaysia restaurants.
Clapboard rates Save the Sundae Cone 78 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's strong creative concept, technically precise execution across OOH and mobile platforms, and a coherent incentive loop that linked billboard interaction to measurable in-store visits, balanced against the limited scale of a single-site activation in Kuala Lumpur.
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