Yahoo Finance McDonald's Electronic Placemats Give You a Good Reason to Drum on the Table
This spring, McDonald's ran a short promotion in the Netherlands that looks expensive and tricky to scale-and yet so, so cool. The fast-food behemoth printed a wafer-thin circuitboard to create a flat drum machine rig that syncs with an app on your phone. Various touchpoints on the mat allow for different sounds and effects, including a small piano keyboard. Sure it's ostensibly a placemat, but in reality it's the best Happy Meal toy in history.
The heavy lifting on the project fell to ad agency TBWA\Neboko and to digital production agency This Page Amsterdam and, alas, it was a brief local promotion. KFC has run a similar placemat stunt with a Bluetooth qwerty pad that let people with greasy, gravy-covered fingers interface with their phones which was similarly cool and similarly short-lived.
Maybe these will mature into longer-lived campaigns. At the very least, this McDonald's mat seems like solid proof of concept, and moreover, a sharp way get gadget nerds in for a Big Mac. Though if they were using a real drum set at least they'd have a chance to burn those calories off.
Source: The Next Web.
