mc donald’s caviar

For Valentine's Day 2026, McDonald's turned a viral fan pairing, Chicken McNuggets and caviar, into the McNugget Caviar Kit, a free, limited edition drop built around one countdown clock hitting zero. Golin, a sister agency within our group, led the creative campaign, while we built the site it ran on: a striking, one of a kind experience true to the campaign's own visual identity, with stock validation, automated emails, and bot protection working quietly underneath.

The kit dropped once, at one exact second, for a limited supply. Millions of people hitting refresh at the same second does not look all that different from a DDoS attack, even when every single one of them is a real fan trying to get their hands on caviar. The backend had to process that spike live, confirm stock the instant it disappeared so nobody could claim something already gone, and separate the real fans from the bots and scripts trying to game the drop, all at the exact second the site could least afford to slow down.

The kit sold out in under 2 minutes, with stock validation holding throughout so no kit was ever claimed twice. The site carried 6 million+ visits and 2 million users on launch day alone, and everything that followed, the campaign hitting number one on X and outpacing the week's biggest cultural events, ran on a platform built to take that kind of hit.