Over the years, McDonald’s branding approach for Summer Drink Days and Summer Treat Days has evolved from sales promotion into seasonal ritual. The latest iteration leans into the idea harder than ever.

A new campaign with creative and strategy led by Cossette pushes deal appeal to the background in favour of emotional context as the QSR positions the brand event as an unofficial kickoff of summer.

Rebecca Smart, marketing director of brand strategy at McDonald’s Canada, tells strategy that recurring characters and slice-of-life moments serve as brand-identity counterpoints to the price-and-product origins of the promotions.

“We need to be sure we’re leveraging lower-funnel tactics to drive direct sales activation, but we can’t forget the huge equity in Summer Drink Days and Summer Treat Days as an annual brand event,” Smart say. “So with this year’s campaigns, we’ve been equally focused on continuing to build that sustained top-of-mind awareness and make sure that whenever Canadians think ‘summer drinks’ or ‘summer treats,’ they think of McDonald’s.”

Smart says social-media insights from years past that showed anticipation building as early as March and April informed the strategy to position the events as a cultural start to summer. Summer Drink Days is now in its 16th season and Summer Treat Days is entering its eighth.

“We know there’s a limited amount of time we have as Canadians to enjoy the summer weather and, more important than ever, we need to also give our guests a great reason for them to choose us as a destination,” she says.

Cossette developed a cast of characters that includes a senior duo showcasing their swimming swagger and a casually observing pool boy who appears in both 30-second hero spots.

Agency executive creative director Andrew Chisholm says the creative goal was “to personify the brand’s connection to spontaneous fun, nostalgia, and the shared anticipation of warm weather tradition.”

“By using humour with heart and a consistent narrative voice, anchored by our recurring guide, we were able to reflect the spirit of Canadian summers while reinforcing McDonald’s as part of the seasonal ritual,” Chisholm says. “The result feels both memorable and unmistakably on-brand.”

OMD worked on media for the campaign that launched last week and is scheduled to run through Sept. 1 on multiple touchpoints including TV, digital video, audio, OOH and social media.