OR: The Grimace Wiki Incident
Foreword: Yeah, this looks like schizoposting. It kinda is, but there is some genuinely interesting marketing data surrounding FANDOMxMcDonalds.
Also, a fuck ton of exposition. Honestly, I don't care about McDonald's at all LMAO I just found all this data while researching GrimaceGate 😹
Thanks for the gift cards, Grimace!
FANDOM staff tried to bribe wiki editors with gift cards to support a corporation's hijacking of a community wiki. Think about that for a moment.
Within the past year, there have been major strides in the fight against FANDOM. Many of the site's major wikis (including some of their crown jewels, the Fallout Wiki and Minecraft Wiki), have left in the past year, taking their precious contributors with them. One of the driving reasons behind this mass exodus is GrimaceGate: FANDOM's infamous hijacking of the McDonald's Wiki and subsequent replacement of its real contents with paid advertisements from McDonald's.
Background
Summer 2023's Grimace's Birthday ad campaign, and the viral Grimace Shake Incident trend which spawned from it, are some of McDonald's most successful marketing pushes in recent years. Like the campaign before it, Fall 2022's Cactus Plant Flea Market Box (Adult Happy Meal) promotion, Grimace's Birthday was centered around nostalgic imagery of vintage McDonald's mascots. Fall 2022's campaign targeted millennials, delivering a Happy Meal that seemed right from the '90s. Summer 2023's campaign however, targeted Gen Z, using a juxtaposition of modern and retro imagery.
Even today, Grimace's wiki page is still the first result on Google.
The McDonald's Wiki had a part to play in this new campaign; while not a major part of it, the site's #1 spot on Google searches for "Grimace" would make it an effortless marketing tool nonetheless. McDonald's, having realized this, reached out to FANDOM to start a partnership...
The FANDOM Angle
In late October 2022, FANDOM staff reached out to the admins of the McDonald's Wiki, bringing news of an upcoming potential collaboration between the two companies. It seemed that McDonald's wanted to have the wiki revamped to better match McDonald's brand identity, which FANDOM staff were understandably quick to task themselves with. The bulk of the work would be handled by the FANDOM team, under the guidance of McDonald's. FANDOM also told the admins that there was a possibility they'd also be able to contribute to the wiki redesign. In order to incentivize cooperation with this unorthodox event, FANDOM staff bribed the wiki admins with McDonald's gift cards.
"McDonald's may be interested in partnering with Fandom ... That could include a redesign based on McDonald's current brand identity and some content update related to any current promotional campaigns ... If the partnership goes forward — we'd be happy to provide you and your co-admin with McDonald's gift cards for your cooperation."
—Brian Linder, FANDOM staff[ref]
Yes, you read that right, FANDOM staff actually tried to bribe editors with gift cards (in a public forum, even)! Ultimately though, the bribe didn't work, as one admin declined (and seemed confused about what FANDOM was doing), while the other ignored staff's messages outright. With a tepid response from the wiki admins, FANDOM did not reach out again until April 2023 (almost 6 months later!), asking for help with deleting troll comments from various articles across the wiki (Grimace's article in particular was singled out). The admins largely ignored this attempt at contact again, leading to FANDOM completely disabling comments across the wiki, since "they weren't being used well". One admin likened this to censorship. FANDOM later reinstated the comments sections in July, but over 30 user blogs were indiscriminately wiped out in the process.
Oops! We're gonna have to delete part of your wiki since our advertisers didn't like it.
Another couple months passed by with no further interaction from FANDOM, until the late hours of 11th June 2023, roughly 12 hours before the Grimace's Birthday campaign launched. FANDOM announced that the wiki would receive a Grimace-themed makeover. In addition, the Grimace article was replaced with an advertisement and protected to prevent vandalism. Three additional articles were created as advertisements and also protected. Links to these pages could be found on the McDonald's Wiki home page, which also became an advertisement itself. The main page featured text, image and even video advertisements, multiple links to download the McDonald's app, and even a link to the Grimace's Birthday website (complete with trackers, presumably to inform the site that traffic originated from FANDOM).
In addition to all this, a legal disclaimer template was created and placed on all the Grimace's Birthday pages. The disclaimer itself linked to the article about the Grimace's Birthday Meal (which was an advertisement page).
The McDonald's Wiki before and after the Grimace's Birthday makeover
(Recreation, 1st November 2023)
By the end of the month, traffic on the McDonald's Wiki was up ~40%, at ~350,000 pageviews up from around ~250,000; However, most of those pageviews probably didn't come from the original ad campaign, but rather the Grimace Shake Incident TikTok trend. By the beginning of July, traffic was up an additional ~15% to over 400,000 pageviews.
McDonald's Wiki site traffic over 6 months
April—September 2023 (dark-colored bar only)
I don't know how much McDonald's paid FANDOM, but with this site traffic alone, they probably walked away with a couple grand just with their normal ads.
The McDonald's Angle
Like any other image-conscious company in the digital age, McDonald's is always monitoring the popularity of their brand.
One great example that comes to mind is 2015's Hipster Hamburglar. According to Google Trends, in March 2015 (for reasons unclear), The Hamburglar's search popularity massively spiked, hitting an all-time high. McDonald's must have noticed this, because two months later in May 2015, Hipster Hamburglar set the Internet ablaze when he was pumped out by the McDonald's marketing team for absolutely no fucking reason.
If nothing else, Hipster Hamburglar was successful in making people look up the character: March 2015's spike was dwarfed by May 2015's spike, leading to an undefeated all-time high in searches for "Hamburglar". The campaign was never followed up by Ricardo McDonald or any other kind of revival of McDonald's mascots, so it can only be assumed this was a direct response to March 2015's search spike.
2015's Hipster Hamburglar, and the data I believe spawned him in the first place
Before May 2015, that tiny spike in March 2015 would have charted at 100 and not 25.
Now you might be wondering: What the hell does all this marketing bullshit have to do with FANDOM? But I promise, this is where it gets interesting.
In late October 2022, McDonald's had just wrapped up the Cactus Plant Flea Market promotion (in which Grimace, after a decade-long hiatus, returned; alongside him were Hamburglar and Birdie). I again used Google Trends to research the popularity of these characters over the ten-year period between October 2012 and October 2022. During that final month alone, Grimace was the most popular of the three mascots, nearly toppling 2015 Hamburglar's popularity. Unsurprisingly, all three were at all-time highs (well, except for Hamburglar).
Graph showing the only two massive spikes in mascot searches:
The Hipster Hamburglar Incident & The Cactus Plant Flea Market Meal
(Key: Blue — Grimace; Red — Hamburglar; Yellow — Birdie)
Cactus Plant Flea Market was McDonald's first taste at a successful viral marketing promotion since 2018's Szechuan Sauce craze, and Grimace was at the forefront of it. I believe that around this time, a marketer at McDonald's noticed Grimace's popularity on Google Trends, and out of curiosity simply looked him up. It's at this moment that the marketer saw the #1 result for "Grimace" on Google: the McDonald's Wiki article.
By the end of the month, FANDOM employees had already leaked information about their upcoming collaboration with McDonald's. On the surface, such a partnership seems incredibly small-scale; to be brutally honest, the quality of the McDonald's Wiki was quite poor, with spam articles, false information, and troll comments littering the site. Having done some quick math, I would wager a guess that the McDonald's Wiki was probably earning a mere $1,500 monthly. McDonald's would essentially be paying for real estate in a place nobody was looking at.
Visual representation of the McDonald's Wiki prior to FANDOM intervention
But a collaboration this foolish wouldn't have been proposed from thin air: Weaponizing Gen Z's fascination with vintage restaurant mascots, wikis which document their lore, and most importantly, that sweet sweet #1 spot on Google, McDonald's had actually secured valuable real estate for guerilla marketing. Who better to answer the question, "Grimace's Birthday? Who the hell is Grimace?", than the wiki page which is #1 on Google? What place could be better for plastering McDonald's app advertisements than this page everyone is about to visit?
After spending almost 6 months perfecting this marketing campaign, McDonald's was ready, and announced that Grimace's Birthday celebration would begin on 11th June. By then, the McDonald's Wiki was fitted with a furry, purple theme matching Grimace, and his wiki page (along with several others, old and new) were replaced with advertisements for the promotion. By the end of the month, traffic on the McDonald's Wiki was up ~40%.
But most of those pageviews probably didn't come from the original ad campaign. Truth be told, searches for "Grimace" were already down by Day 2 of Grimace's Birthday, and had crashed by Day 3. With Gen Z lacking a nostalgic connection to Grimace unlike the generations before them, it seemed like the promotion would only be a modest success compared to Cactus Plant Flea Market. But that's when the campaign was saved by Gen Z themselves: When "The Grimace Shake Incident" became a viral TikTok trend, searches for "Grimace" skyrocketed, instantly crushing "Hipster Hamburglar" by over 1,600%.
Whew. That there on the far left is Hipster Hamburglar...
(Key: Blue — Grimace; Red — Hamburglar)
In Q2 2023, McDonald's went on to report a 14% revenues increase over Q2 2022, with the CEO pointing the finger at Grimace.
Community Backlash: GrimaceGate
One of the first users to notice FANDOM's sellout of the McDonald's Wiki was actually a frequent editor of the Grimace article. He immediately took to Twitter to speak his thoughts on the situation, with his tweet ending up in multiple news publications, as well as shared amongst wiki users. In the wake of this controversy, the Minecraft Wiki decided to fork off FANDOM, with several users citing GrimaceGate as a reason to leave. This announcement only generated more articles covering the controversy.
The tweet exposing the truth behind FANDOM's activities
Since the Minecraft Wiki's departure, more major wikis have departed, including the Feed The Beast Wiki, the Darkest Dungeon Wiki, the Warcraft Wiki, and the Hollow Knight Wiki, the latter of which just forked yesterday.
Takeaway
I can't blame McDonald's for exploiting the wiki; it was a no-brainer marketing idea that accidentally ended up paying off big time. But FANDOM's acceptance of the deal forsook the sanctity of wikis as community projects. It's reprehensible that FANDOM asked the McDonald's Wiki community to help them orchestrate part of a multimillion dollar campaign... in exchange for McDonald's gift cards.