Media

When now-President Donald Trump decided to spend a shift serving McDonald’s french fries on the 2024 campaign trail, it put Tariq Hassan, then McDonald’s chief marketing officer, in a tight spot.

“You don’t own your brand when those cultural moments take place. All you own is your voice and your actions and what you do around it,” he recalled on Semafor’s Mixed Signals podcast.

The challenge, he said, was engaging with an unavoidable media moment without appearing partisan or alienating the restaurant chain’s 26 million daily customers. The message McDonald’s landed on: “We’re not red, we’re not blue — we’re golden.”

“The critical element for the brand was to not engage in politics, but to understand how to participate in culture,” he said. “When you have that kind of percentage of the population coming through your doors, and you have that kind of percentage of population working behind your counters, you’ve got to listen, and then you’ve got to reflect and stay true to the brand.”

McDonald’s took a similar strategy in 2023, during what Hassan called the “summer of brand attack,” when conservative outrage over products and content highlighting transgender people fueled boycotts of brands like Bud Light and Target. To avoid the missteps of other companies, McDonald’s approached influencers it was working with ahead of time, Hassan said, defusing the situation before the fast-food chain could get sucked in. “We very quickly turned off the influencers,” he said. Hassan declined to name names, but said “no one to this day even knows it even took place.”

Hassan also spoke to Semafor about why he thinks admakers should still engage with journalists and what goes into a good celebrity Super Bowl ad. You can listen to the full interview on Mixed Signals from Semafor Media wherever you get your podcasts.

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