The Grimace Shake Is a Viral Trend to Die For

When the weird internet meets smart advertising.

Welcome to my paid subscribers! Paid subscribers to The Internet User Experience (IUX) will get an extra in-depth post per week on Wednesdays, as well as unlimited access to archived posts. Free posts come out every Monday.

---

⏰ TL;DR

• McDonald’s Grimace birthday shake captivated TikTok, with users creating a viral trend of them enjoying the drink and pretending to die.

• The trend taps into longstanding internet culture trends around food, virality, the visual, and strategic social media marketing/advertising.

🎁 Happy Birthday, Grimace

Things got weird on the McDonald’s Twitter account in early June. The fast food restaurant’s account began retweeting every mention of one of its characters, a purple monster named Grimace. This was followed by an account takeover announcement by Grimace, and then a tweet with a phone number, hinting at a surprise.

Source: McDonald’s Twitter account

The surprise turned out to be the Grimce birthday shake, part of a meal to celebrate the character’s birthday. The berry-flavored, purple-appearing shake would be available for a limited time. The shake and the campaign were the advertising brainchildren of agency Weiden and Kennedy, who are responsible for some of the strangest (and most buzzworthy) commercials in modern memory. But even they probably couldn’t predict what happened next.