---
type: article
slug: mcdonalds-magic-stories-grand-one-webby
category: news
title: McDonald's Magic Stories wins a Webby and Grand One
summary: >-
  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.
authors:
  - slug: joni-juup
publishedAt: '2026-05-15'
updatedAt: '2026-05-15'
draft: false
heroImage: /work/mcdonalds/magic-stories-hero.jpg
heroImageAlt: McDonald's Magic Stories campaign artwork
heroVideo: 'https://vimeo.com/1157565466/a82529ba76'
hasInteractiveDemos: false
faqs: []
keyPoints:
  - >-
    Magic Stories won the Webby People's Voice Award (an international public
    vote) and Grand One (Finland's digital industry jury award).
  - >-
    We built the AI composer behind it, generating personalized, reactive
    stories where user-created avatars go on adventures.
  - >-
    The core challenge was balancing open-ended AI creativity with the safety
    guarantees a family brand requires.
---

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](https://winners.webbyawards.com/2026/advertising-media-pr/branded-content/food-beverage/373033/mcdonalds-magic-stories), the [Grand One entry](https://grandone.fi/kilpailutyo/?entry=mcdonald-s-magic-stories), and the [campaign case site](https://mcd-casesite.vercel.app/).