McDonalds have teamed up with Disney, to run its biggest ever mobile marketing campaign, around the launch of The Incredibles.

Cups will be printed with eight-digit codes, which consumers will be encouraged to text in to win a range of mobile content prizes. The mobile content is being provided by Disney Mobile and includes logos, ringtones, movie soundbites and Java games, with every entrant a winner.

according to New Media Zero.

On the plus side, it’s great that they’ve moved away from “Text and Loose”. This was the original type of promotion run using mobile as the fulfilment mechanic. Promotions like Cadbury and McDonalds used to offer a limited number of prizes, which you could win by texting in.

Imagine running an old style snail mail competition. After a couple of months you get a very nice letter from the fulfilment house saying.

“Hey! Great news! You know that competition you entered into with Sucker’s Suckie Sweets? Well, guess what, you lost Bozo. I hope you continue to enjoy Sucker’s products.”

Instead, you entered, forgot all about it and if you were one of the lucky few, you were contacted if you’d won something.

With the original text and win campaigns, you got back an instant “Dear Bozo” message, which hardly does a great job in reinforcing your expensively won brand values.

So at least the new campaign does offer everyone something. But can’t the industry get a little smarter than yet and another text and win promotion?

Now in fairness to the agencies putting this together, McDonalds aren’t known for their marketing prowess. The best they’ve ever done on this front is giving away free food with kids toys
In fact, you have to remember that McDonalds are primarily a real estate operation and without the very clever real estate leasing programme quietly going in the background they would have gone bust years ago.

After real estate, you have an obsession with systems and “food”.

And a long way after that you have marketing.

While there’ll always be a place in mobile to use texting as a fulfilment mechanic, can’t we be a little more innovative? Just as there’s more to marketing than contests/competitions, there’s more to mobile than Text and Win.