Happy new year to you, too

A doorstep at first light

On the morning of 1 January 2026, the first OOH and press executions for McDonald's UK appear across British towns.^{1, 2} They show people in pajamas, dressing gowns and pulled hoodies receiving McDelivery bags at their front doors.³ The interiors visible behind them carry the residue of the night before: empty bottles, pulled streamers, a folded paper crown, the soft furniture rearranged the wrong way. The headline reads, in a single line, "Happy New Year to you, too."¹ The McDonald's wordmark sits below.

The campaign is the latest in the 40-year working relationship between McDonald's UK and Leo Burnett UK, one of the longest-standing client-agency arrangements in British advertising.⁴ It is also the latest in a sequence of executions that route the brand through everyday, lightly self-aware moments rather than menu imagery. The 2023 platform "Raise Your Arches" had treated the golden arches as a facial gesture between colleagues. The new year platform routes the brand through the universal physical aftermath of the first night of the year.

The work

The photography is by Dan Burn-Forti, who has shot for McDonald's UK and Leo Burnett UK before.³ The brief was to capture real delivery moments rather than to stage them: the executions read as documentary rather than as set-built advertising.² Burn-Forti's frames hold the doorways as cropped fragments, with the bag receiving customer occupying most of the frame and the room behind them tipping inward at a domestic angle. The eyes are bleary, the hair flattened on one side, the expression neither performed nor disguised.

The colour direction holds to McDonald's UK's recent posture: muted, daylight-neutral interiors set against the red and yellow of the McDelivery bag, which is the only branded surface in most executions. The campaign uses the McDonald's wordmark in white on a yellow keyline at the foot of the layout. There is no golden arches lockup in the print and OOH; the bag carries the brand. The McDelivery rider's hand is visible in some frames, holding the receipt or the second bag.

The campaign is national in OOH placement, anchored on six-sheet roadside, 48-sheet roadside and digital street-furniture inventory across major British cities. A press execution ran in The Sun, the Metro and the Daily Mirror on 1 January 2026. There is no broadcast spot tied to the launch. The shoot was a late-stage commission: Leo Burnett UK confirmed to Creative Salon that the executions were produced inside a compressed window to meet the 1 January 2026 release date.¹

The continuity

The work fits a posture that McDonald's UK and Leo Burnett UK have refined over the last three years. The 2023 "Raise Your Arches" platform, which won a Bronze Lion in the Film category at Cannes Lions that year, removed the McDonald's wordmark and the food from the work altogether and routed the brand through an eyebrow gesture.^{4, 5} Subsequent platforms, including "Make It Yours," "Fancy a McDonald's," and the "Only at McDonald's" platform, have all routed the brand through customer behaviour rather than through menu imagery. The new year work continues that posture. The food is in the bag. The bag is at the door. The brand is in the situation.

The headline carries the load. "Happy New Year to you, too" plays the doorbell-and-doorstep encounter as a brief social reciprocity, with the McDelivery rider implied as the unseen first speaker. The line is unannotated by the food, the menu or the offer; it is a piece of conversational dialogue lifted out of the encounter. The construction is consistent with the McDonald's UK voice that Leo Burnett UK has developed since the late 2010s: low-volume, observational, anchored on a single line of British vernacular.

The brand reading

The campaign occupies a position that few quick-service restaurant brands operate from. The hangover frame is recognisably consumer-side and recognisably unguarded. McDonald's UK does not introduce a menu item, a deal or a new product. It does not stage a New Year's resolution counter-narrative. It registers, with care, that a recognisable share of its customers begin the year in a specific physical state and that McDelivery exists to meet them in that state. The work invites the audience to recognise themselves in the frame.

That position is available to McDonald's UK because the brand has built, over decades, a customer relationship in which the door, the doorstep and the morning after are already part of the shared territory. Other brands cannot route a national OOH platform through pajamas and crumpled streamers without a credibility cost. McDonald's UK, anchored on the same distinctive brand asset architecture that holds across 100+ markets, can. The 2026 work registers the brand as a participant in the morning of 1 January rather than as a sender of seasonal good wishes from the outside.

The campaign also registers the continuity of the Leo Burnett UK relationship as a strategic position in its own right. Forty years of single-agency stewardship allow the work to compound on prior platforms rather than to reintroduce the brand each year. The new year work assumes the audience already knows how McDonald's UK speaks. It speaks, briefly, at the door.