Just this evening, I received an email from Kai Palileo (Innovations Manager under the Starcom Medievest Group and currently the media agency of McDonald’s in the Philippines). The message is this:

Dear Adaphobic,

I would like to just send you a message regarding the post you made about the Free McDonald’s GCs, first and foremost, I would like to introduce myself, I am Kai Palileo and an Innovations Manager under the Starcom Medievest Group and currently the media agency of McDonald’s in the Philippines. This viral campaign is actually one of the digital initiatives I handled for McDo a couple of months back. It is not a hoax. I’d like to assure you that this was an authentic campaign in which my team was tasked to answer thousands of emails (there were only 2 of us answering each email) and in just a few minutes of launch, we received so many emails that we literally ran out of free GCs to give away in less than an hour. We already closed the campaign and the emails still keep coming in that’s why if you try emailing, it will already bounce back. Would also like to apologize if the call center was not aware of the promo as the call center is only equipped to take delivery calls and are only aware of store or delivery related promos. This feedback has definitely taught us to ensure that all channels are well informed of each and every promo that we do and it is very well noted and greatly appreciated.

If you would like to further authenticate my response to you, you may call our head office at 884 8053 or call McDonald’s head office instead of the call center.

Thank you so much

Sincerely,
Kai Palileo

I apologize for blatantly blogging that their promo is a hoax. It’s just I think that holding such kind of promo through email can be easily considered as scam/spam or phishing strategy (collecting emails) considered to be an untrusted thing without confirming if it is safe or not.