McDonald's raises the arches into eyebrows

An eyebrow that carries the brand

On 13 January 2023, McDonald's UK and Leo Burnett UK launch Raise Your Arches, a 90 second cinema and broadcast film directed by Edgar Wright.¹ The film traces a group of office workers who agree, without speaking, to head to McDonald's for lunch. The agreement is communicated by a single gesture: one colleague raises both eyebrows, the gesture is received and returned across the open-plan room, and the entire team rises in coordinated motion to the soundtrack of Yello's 1985 single "Oh Yeah."² The brand identification arrives in the final frame as a single graphic device: the lifted eyebrows form the Golden Arches. The brand wordmark, the restaurant interior and the food itself remain off screen for the duration of the spot.³

The film is the first McDonald's broadcast commercial in the brand's history to carry no food image, no restaurant interior and no McDonald's wordmark in the body of the work.³ The Golden Arches appear only as the eyebrow gesture, drawn from the curve of the brand's logo. The production is by Moxie Pictures.¹ The audio platform extends across cinema, broadcast and digital, with adapted six-second and 30 second cuts running in the weeks following the 13 January 2023 launch.

The brief and the gesture

The work emerges from a Leo Burnett UK strategic brief written for McDonald's UK at the start of 2022. The brief asks the agency to extend the brand's relationship with British customers beyond the menu and into the everyday rituals through which McDonald's already operates as a social signal: the agreement to go together, the silent acceptance of an after-work plan, the office round of fries on a Friday afternoon. The agency response is to surface a single physical gesture that already exists in British social life, the eyebrow lift as a wordless invitation, and to anchor it on the visual form of the Golden Arches.

Chaka Sobhani, then chief creative officer of Leo Burnett UK and global, leads the agency-side creative direction.¹ Edgar Wright, the British director of Shaun of the Dead, Baby Driver and Last Night in Soho, is brought in by the agency for the film execution.² Wright's choreographic timing and his treatment of synchronised group movement, familiar from his earlier work, run through the entire piece. The cast is unnamed and unbranded; no celebrity is used.

The award response

The film wins one Silver and two Bronze Lions at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in June 2023, including in the Film category.^{4, 5} It does not win the Cannes Film Grand Prix that year, which goes to Apple's R.I.P. Leon.⁴ The Outdoor Grand Prix that year goes to another piece of work entirely. Raise Your Arches does, however, win the Grand Prix at the 2023 APG Creative Strategy Awards in London, the British advertising industry's primary award for strategic thinking, and is named the most-liked Film Lions winner of the festival in an audience survey published by Campaign magazine in July 2023.^{6, 7}

The film also achieves measurable cultural pickup. In the six weeks following the launch, the spot accumulates more than 160 million views across paid, owned and earned channels, with a substantial share of the volume on TikTok where the eyebrow gesture is reproduced by users and McDonald's UK regional account holders.⁸ The brand does not pursue suppression of the user reproductions; the agency strategic case post-launch treats the gesture as a brand asset that has entered the public domain of British physical vocabulary, in the same category as the Tesco "Every Little Helps" claim or the Aldi "Like Brands. Only Cheaper" architecture.

The distinctive brand asset principle

Raise Your Arches operates on the same distinctive-brand-asset logic that runs through Cossette's 2018 Follow the Arches platform and Turner Duckworth's 2018 Speedee identity system. The brand's most visually recognised element, the curve of the M, is recoverable in fragment. The Cossette work crops the mark into a directional arrow. The Leo Burnett UK work transposes the mark from a logo onto a human face. In both cases the wordmark is not required because the curve carries the identification on its own. The strategic frame is that the brand's distinctive asset is now strong enough to operate as a self-sufficient signal across a range of media contexts, including those in which the brand's product, name and physical infrastructure are absent.

The film anchors a multi-year platform for McDonald's UK that extends across "Fancy a McDonald's" (2023), "Only at McDonald's" (2024) and "Happy New Year to You, Too" (2026), all by Leo Burnett UK. Each of these subsequent platforms carries the same posture: the brand operates in the social register of British everyday life, the work is anchored on a recognisable customer behaviour, and the food and the wordmark sit in a quiet, subsidiary role rather than at the centre of the frame. Raise Your Arches is the strategic founding work of this posture and remains the reference piece across Leo Burnett UK's contemporary McDonald's portfolio.