McDonald's China - We Love To See You Play

We partnered with McDonald’s China on a nationwide character-led campaign to celebrate Children’s Day 2025.

It all started with a nugget

For Children’s Day 2025, McDonald’s China commissioned Eva Cremers to put her own spin on the McDonald’s universe to enable McDonald’s customers young and old to tap into their own “inner child”.

The creative challenge: how does an artist bring their own voice to a brand with such a well-established world already?

It all started with a nugget of course. And obviously some Eva magic.

🐔 The Brief

The campaign centred around the chicken nugget, one of McDonald’s most iconic menu items, and one that’s hugely popular with children and adults alike. The brief was to hero the nuggets but also showcase the existing McDonald’s characters in a way that appealed to Gen Z and Gen Alpha families.

🍟 The Approach

“One of the challenges was how to take such a rich world and put my own take on it. I didn’t want to simply do Eva versions of the characters I wanted to extend the whole McDonald’s universe! So I created a whole theme park where nuggets and characters were all having fun together, bringing in key McDonald’s elements as easter eggs throughout. I wanted the world to represent the fun and innocence you have as a child.”

- Eva Cremers

Eva set about crafting memorable characters and designs that would not only create an immersive and whimsical experience for the kids, but a nostalgic journey for the parents and families, calling back to their days of Happy Meal toys. As well as creating a set of iconic McDonald’s characters in her own signature style, she created a hero visual for the campaign, filled to the brim with nugget characters on bumper cars, ferris wheels, rollercoasters and much more.

Activations

The campaign ran for two weeks across the whole of China and included an exclusive holiday-themed menu, limited-edition packaging, bespoke merchandise, themed pop-up restaurants, and a TVC from Leo Burnett.

...and it didn’t stop there. There were even pop-up theme parks featuring the rides and characters from the hero artwork in key cities around China.

“The final deliverables for the campaign were constantly evolving as the project grew and grew, so we decided to create everything from an isometric POV for maximum flexibility. This meant elements could be lifted and used independently, but that also the whole scene could be extended for different touchpoints.”

- Ross Frame, Global Head of Production at Jelly

Production

We worked closely with our production partners K&W, who operate out of China, to help smooth the whole process and overcome challenges that come with working with a brand on the other side of the world.