About

McDonald's "Create Your Taste" is an online marketing campaign launched by the global fast food restaurant chain McDonald’s that encourages Internet users to create their own custom-designed burgers using the web-based application "Burger Builder." Upon its launch in late July 2016, the campaign quickly became a target of an online raid among pranksters and spawned a variety of humorous sandwich creations.

Origin

On July 1st, 2016, the New Zealand branch of the McDonald’s franchise launched a web-based application^[1] that allows its customers to design and order a personalized burger as part of the company's ongoing global marketing campaign “Create Your Taste,” which had been met by generally positive reception after it was soft-launched in McDonald's locations across Australia and Canada in 2015.

On July 20th, NeoGAF Forums^[2] user studyguy posted a thread titled "McDonalds asks the internet to make a burger, it obliges," featuring various prank custom burger creations submitted to the "Create Your Taste" site (shown below).

Spread

That same day, the internet humor site Dorkly^[3] published an article about the prank burger creations. Meanwhile, Redditor SirGanjaSpliffington submitted the Dorkly article to /r/funny,^[5] where it received upwards of 7,100 votes (88% upvoted) and 1,200 comments. In the coming days, several news sites published articles about the online troll campaign, including The Telegraph,^[6] Refinery 29,^[7] The Huffington Post^[8] and UpRoxx.^[9]

Shutdown

On July 21st, the archive of user-submitted burgers were removed from the McDonald’s site and the website for the MakeBurgerHistory^[1] application began redirecting to McDonalds.co.nz. A mirror of the web app is available at the McDonald’s Australia site.^[4]

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References