Magic Stories, a generative storytelling experience we built for McDonald's, won the Webby People's Voice Award and Grand One this spring. We built the AI composer that turns each family's visit into a personalized, reactive adventure.
Magic Stories, a generative storytelling experience we built for McDonald's, won two awards this spring: the Webby People's Voice Award and Grand One, Finland's largest digital industry competition, where it took Best Content Marketing.
A story that builds with every visit
Magic Stories lives inside the Family Mode of the McDonald's app. Each visit becomes a new chapter in a personalized, animated story that casts the family as the heroes. Kids and parents create their own avatars, those avatars go on adventures, and the story reacts to the choices they make along the way, so no two families ever get the same tale and every visit unlocks the next one.
Building an AI composer
The hard part was the technical implementation: balancing genuine AI creative capability against the safety guarantees a family brand requires. We built an AI composer that orchestrates multiple elements together, including language models, custom-trained image generation, the user-created avatars, and the story logic, into a single experience that produces a fresh, personalized, on-brand story every time, reliably and autonomously.
Two awards, weeks apart
That combination of creative range and dependable safety is what landed the recognition. The Webby People's Voice Award is decided by public vote and Grand One by an industry jury, and within weeks of each other an international audience and a Finnish jury picked out the same project. You can see the work and the full credits on the Webby winners page, the Grand One entry, and the campaign case site.
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