McDonald’s Plans Exciting New Use for Mobile Payments Functions

August 27, 2018         By: Steven Anderson

You’ve got to hand it to McDonald’s for being one of the first major movers in the mobile order and pay field. It embraced mobile payments surprisingly quickly, and left a lot of the field struggling to catch up. Now it’s starting to seem like most every place with a drive-thru window is catching on to mobile order and pay, and McDonald’s is kicking it up a notch by using its mobile order and pay as part of a larger contest for a prize that’s almost legendary in nature.

The prize in question is known as the “McGold Card,” a card that effectively entitles the holder to free McDonald’s food for the rest of his or her life. This marks the first time, reports note, that a McGold Card has ever been given away through a contest, which concluded on Friday. Essentially, the card will be awarded to one of the McDonald’s mobile app users, along with a 24-carat gold phone case.

There aren’t many McGold Card holders out there. The first one ever went in 1965 to the mayor of St. Louis, Alfonso J. Cervantes. A previous governor of Michigan also took one, as well as a king of Sweden. Now, somewhere, one more has been minted for the winner of the mobile app contest.

This is easily one of the most clever applications for drawing attention to the mobile payments concept I’ve seen in a long time. By creating this almost mythical prize and then offering it up to someone who uses the mobile payments app, they should spark a ton of interest in its existence and get more users involved. The only downside to this contest is that the impact will likely be limited, unless they go and bring something like this out once a year, or at least on some regular schedule.

The losses incurred by the lifetime food giveaway will likely be comparatively minor when matched against the gains of users trying to win that lifetime giveaway. Only time will tell just how well this works, or if we’ll ever see it again, but for now, McDonald’s likely saw a hefty slug of new users, and plenty of them will likely continue using the mobile order options.