McDonald’s Happy Meal reaches millions of children every day, and the Happy Meal App is where that turns into play: games, AR activities and things to make and do, built around a child-development framework that R/GA created and Fundamentally Children validated. It helps 5 to 8 year olds build skills like logical thinking, creativity, communication, memory and attention, while they mess about with Happy, the McDonald’s box character.
It has more than 25 million users, is live in more than 117 markets and 44 languages, and in every one of them it always reflects whichever Happy Meal toy is in restaurants that week.
Why I was there
R/GA hired me specifically to be the Global Tech Director on this account. R/GA owned the platform and the client relationship, and PRELOADED, the games studio, were the development partner doing the build.
By the time I arrived at the end of 2019, the platform had been running since 2015 (it launched as Happy Studio across 42 European countries) and had grown fast, and the codebase had grown faster. Every licence, market and feature had added another layer, and it had reached the point where the code was slowing the team down instead of the other way round.
Simplifying it
I came in with a Unity background, which meant I could talk to the developers about the actual code rather than managing from a distance. Working with Preloaded, I simplified the architecture.
That’s what makes the platform scale today. The app is built from a set of adaptable game and AR frameworks, and new licensed experiences are delivered as asset bundles through custom tools and a content pipeline, often in the background, so kids don’t even need to update the app.
Reshaping the team
The tech wasn’t the only thing that needed untangling. I set up new roles across the team so it was clear who decided what, who talked to whom, and where a question went to get answered. Communication got shorter and work moved faster.
And, honestly, part of the job was bringing some new energy into a project that people had been grinding away at for a long time.
A run of licensed games
Once the foundations were steady, the fun part started. I oversaw the creation of a lot of licensed 3D games, working directly with licensor studios including Disney, Universal and Illumination, to bring their films into the Happy Meal each month.
One I was especially glad to be part of was Scan the Smile in summer 2020, which brought the Minions to life in AR for kids and families around the world.
