Actress Mindy Kaling stars in a new McDonald's ad, which doesn't mention the fast food chain at all. Picture: YouTube

The fast food chain’s first unbranded marketing campaign, starring American actress Mindy Kaling (The Office, The Mindy Project), does not appear on any official McDonald’s social media accounts and those famous golden arches are nowhere to be seen.

Kaling, wearing a yellow dress against a red background, urges the audience to Google “that place where Coke tastes so good”, to find out who the ads are about.

“If you do Google search for ‘That place where Coke tastes so good’, you’ll know. And while we can’t say where that is, we can say why,” she says to camera in one clip.

In another, she says: “According to some, there is a place where Coca Cola tastes like, so good. Go ahead, do a Google search for ‘That place where Coke tastes so good’. Yeah, right now! I’ll wait.”

McDonald’s famously sells “post mix” soft drinks, where flavoured syrup is added to carbonated water on site, instead of being pre-mixed at a factory. It tastes markedly different from the Coca Cola you buy from a supermarket or a service station.

Here’s how it works, according to the McDonald’s website: “The water and Coca-Cola syrup are pre-chilled before entering our fountain dispensers with the ratio of syrup set to allow for ice to melt.

“We also keep our fountain beverage system cold so your drink can always be at the peak of refreshing. In order to ensure our drinks are always meeting a gold standard, we have proper filtration methods in place.”

According to the chief marketing officer of McDonald’s in the US, Deborah Wahl, the ads are aimed at millenials and acknowledge “how they’re discovering information” they trust.

“They are very influenced by word of mouth and what their peers say,” Ms Wahl told The New York Times.

Kaling has been a huge McDonald’s fan for years. Her character on The Mindy Kaling Project is often pictured eating a burger and fries at her desk and the company once sent her a stack of $10 gift cards for her birthday.

“If you follow me on any kind of social media you will see that I’m constantly eating McDonald’s, and not in a campy, skinny-actress way where I go when I’m on my period and ‘being bad!’” she wrote in her book, Why Not Me?

“I go regularly enough that the woman at the Crescent Heights & Sunset McDonald’s [in Los Angeles] gives me ranch and buffalo sauce packets for my McNuggets without me having to ask.”

McDonald’s isn’t the first fast food chain to launch a tech-savvy ad campaign.

Just last week Burger King released a TV ad designed to hijack people’s Google Home devices, by encouraging them to say “OK Google” and ask about their Whopper burger.

That campaign was a flop - Google blocked the ad from triggering any of its devices.