Burger King Spider-Man 3

Return to McDonald's Happymeal.com

More of a Spider-Man site than a Burger King presence, out of the 18 links on this page, only one connects users with the Kids Club. This link opens a PDF application for a form that needs to be printed, filled out and mailed in. I clicked it twice out of disbelief to make sure they were serious.

What this complete breakdown in the interactive communication cycle exposes is just how hard it is to create branded websites for kids and return valuable metrics without breaking any laws.

McDonald's at least tries with a simple user name/password registration, giving kids the ability to answer poll questions like, "How many Shrek movies have you seen?" But trying to get any valuable metrics from a kid's club website appears almost impossible, with restrictive registration laws (which I'm a fan of), and web metrics only reaching as far as aggregate data.

BDAs allow QSRs (or anyone with kid-dependent sites, for that matter) to work within the law and still get utterly granular metrics.

While children can remain anonymous, their BDA is still unique, and it is trackable from that point outward, including geographics, interaction paths and data as fine as individual mouse movements in real-time. In fact, the insights gained from BDA metrics packages are so precise they quickly lead to more educated decision making for other media buys.

Where it comes to co-branding, the desktop provides a complete canvas without the size or interactivity restrictions of the web. If being able to control Spidey's web-slinging antics anytime on your desktop doesn't get kids to download it, I'm not sure what will.

This brings up the other challenge of reaching out and persuading kids (who in turn get their parents) to come to the site in the first place. With BDAs, the application is the toy kids and their parents will both appreciate.

Over the past few years, the price of USB key chains has fallen drastically. BDAs can easily fit in the memory of a USB key chain and still have plenty of room for kids to take digital homework home, or give parents an added utility in ferrying work files back and forth. They're small and easy to toss into a kid's meal.

The medium of the USB key chain alone is enough to spark interest and gain a significant number of installations. Will they be inexpensive enough to meet Quick Service Restaurants' demands on per-piece cost? It's only a matter of time.

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