What is Wrong with McD's USA?

The results have been mixed at best so far, but it's hard to view the fast food industry's moves as anything more than flattery. At the very least, McDonald's willingness to forgo its core business to mimic the likes of Shake Shack points to a future in which the quick service food industry looks a lot more like Chipotle and a lot less like, well, McDonald's.

But the big winner on Sunday may have been McDonald’s.

Marketing analytics firm Ace Metrix said on Monday McDonald’s one-minute “Pay with Lovin’” Super Bowl ad won the top score based on surveys of viewer reaction.

The commercial’s Ace Score was 706, one of the highest ever for a Super Bowl ad, and 21 percent above the category norm for quick-service restaurants, Ace Metrix said. Budweiser, Coca-Cola and Snickers tied for the No. 2 spot.

“An Ace Score over 700 is about as common as a perfect game in Major League Baseball: 0.06 percent of all ads over the past five years have scored above 700,” Peter Daboll, Ace Metrix’s CEO, said in a statement. “McDonald’s has achieved Super Bowl gold, surprising and delighting consumers and changing perceptions about the fast-food giant.”

According to AdAge, McDonald’s commercial also won the top spot in Twitter polls.

The Oak Brook, Ill.-based quick-service operator’s social media team was busy tweeting during the game — but not with its own ads.

Throughout the Super Bowl, McDonald’s encouraged cross-brand lovin’ by urging followers to retweet to earn prizes related to the commercials of other brands.

Much of McDonald’s strategy appears to be aimed at responding to the threat those chains pose. The company’s biggest strategy at the moment is Create Your Taste, a platform that will enable dine-in consumers to make customized burgers and chicken sandwiches. McDonald’s aims to roll out the platform in 2,000 restaurants this year.

Yet McDonald’s problem is more complex than losing customers to fast casual. McDonald’s customers are different from those who frequent Chipotle or Shake Shack.

McDonald’s same-store sales were 620 basis points lower than quick-service burger competitors in the third quarter of last year. If Shake Shack and Chipotle are taking business from McDonald’s, why are they not taking business from Burger King and Sonic?

McDonald’s is largely about convenience and value, and it has long struggled to sell higher priced menu items. Premium items have come and gone, like the Arch Deluxe and more recently the Angus burger line.

But the biggest failure under Thompson’s reign was Mighty Wings, itself a premium product. In November, Fortune detailed the 2013 Mighty Wings failure, noting that 10 million pounds of chicken wings went unsold, despite early tests that drew rave reviews — much like Create Your Taste is right now.

Unsurprisingly, franchisees and analysts appear to be pushing McDonald’s in the other direction. As Nation’s Restaurant News noted yesterday, many analysts say McDonald’s should aggressively cut items from its menu and focus on convenience, speed and value. One went so far as to say he wouldn’t be surprised if Easterbrook ended the Create Your Taste plan.

Sick of Sriracha? Need a new sauce to squirt on everything? You're in luck: According to the Independent, McDonald's is finally selling bottles of its super secret, questionably orange, Big Mac Special Sauce. Yes, now you can make everything taste like hangovers and broken childhood memories. Until now, the only way customers could get their hands on the sauce was to eat copious amounts of Big Macs, or attempt to make one of the thousands of copycat recipes.

Only 200 500ml bottles are being produced and the first is currently up for grabs on eBay. If you have nearly $18,000 to blow that is. Currently, the bid is at $23,000 AUD ($18,056 USD) with eight days left to go, and all proceeds will go to charity. The description on eBay might just sell you on the hefty price tag: It promises that the sauce will make everything taste better — including Hungarian Goulash and "your boyfriend's gross lasagne" — because it will all just taste like a Big Mac. Plus with 500ml to experiment with "you'll have enough to impress your friends at dinner parties, cheat your way to cooking show fame, and get elected as Prime Minister!"

If you miss your chance on eBay (or don't want to drop thousands of dollars) and can get to Australia, Metro writes that McDonald's will sell 600 25ml tubs of the sauce in locations around the country for just 50 cents ($.39 USD). The Independent notes that lines will probably be around the block. Perhaps if McDonald's sold the sauce full time, it could save the struggling chain from financial ruin.

That is mostly a bad rap, the milk shakes and sauces are concoctions from the food chemists, and maybe the nuggets too, but the rest is regular food.

Consumers talked about McDonald’s’ “Pay with Lovin’” promotion more than any other television ad that aired during the Super Bowl, on Feb. 1, but the campaign doesn’t appear to have positively impacted brand perception, according to survey by market research firm YouGov BrandIndex.

On Super Bowl Sunday, 36 percent of adults said they would consider making a purchase at McDonald’s. Eleven days after the ad and its corresponding social media campaign began, that number rose to 39 percent.

Most disturbing of all is the horrifying fact that because ammonium hydroxide is considered part of the “component in a production procedure” by the USDA, consumers may not know when the chemical is in their food.

In our restaurants, we finish frying with an oil blend that contains canola oil, corn oil, soybean oil, hydrogenated soybean oil, as well as citric acid, dimethylpolysiloxane and TBHQ.

On top of all that, Easterbrook barely mentioned what McDonald’s plans to do to address possibly its biggest challenge: customer’s worsening perception of its food. On the call with investors, he talked about making “big moves” and having “wonderful opportunities” with personalizing and customizing food, but few new details on when or how that would happen. That might explain why Wall Street wasn’t sold—shares of McDonald’s closed down 1.7 percent on Monday, to $96.13. On the other hand, Easterbrook seemed quite earnest when he told investors, repeatedly, that he intends to carefully reassess all the company’s decisions, and that he recognizes it’s time for a change. “The message is clear. We’re not on our game,” Easterbrook said in a videotaped statement. “The numbers don’t lie.”

To get its business back on track, McDonald’s handing more control to its “incredible network of dedicated franchisees,” the company said. Over the next three years, McDonald’s plans to accelerate its refranchising—that is, turning company-owned stores into franchised ones. By the end of 2018, it plans to convert 3,500 restaurants into franchises such that 90 percent of its locations will be franchised globally (up from a current 81 percent). Previously, McDonald’s had planned to refranchise at least 1,500 restaurants by the end of 2016. Easterbrook has reorganized the company’s operations into four main segments: the U.S.; international lead markets (Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and the U.K.); high-growth markets (China, Italy, Poland, Russia, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, and the Netherlands); and foundational markets (about 100 different countries).

The problem, Kalinowski said, comes not from a lack of catering to millennials, or trying to compete with the likes of “modern” fast-food chains like Chipotle (CMG), New York-based Shake Shack (SHAK), or Panera Bread (PNRA), it comes from not understanding its own competition. He said fast-casual is a category in which consumers don’t want to spend a lot of money, but if they do, they’re willing to spend it on better-for-you food that can't be found at most traditional fast-food chains.

And it’s that way of thinking that’s helping damage the McDonald’s brand.

But it’s not the biggest threat, according to Kalinowski.

“It’s clearly Chick-fil-A,” he said. “Ten years ago, it was the nineteenth-biggest chain in America. Today it’s the eighth biggest, and it’ll end the decade as the fourth biggest,” he said. “It’s traditional fast food done right. They focus on chicken.”

Although McDonald’s seems to be known for its juicy hamburgers, and it’s often referred to as a burger chain, Kalinowski said it actually sells more chicken than beef.

“There’s so much growth for [Chick-fil-A] for decades to come: There are less than 2,000 of them while McDonald’s is getting close to 16,000 restaurants in the U.S.,” he explained. “That’s the bigger threat because what Chick-fil-A offers is much closer to McDonald’s business.”