How a prank by 2 students to improve McDonald’s ad diversity turned into a marketing campaign

YouTuber Jevh Maravilla recently revealed on Twitter that he and a friend snuck a fake-branded poster of themselves enjoying some McDonald’s meals onto an actual McDonald’s wall–for 51 whole unnoticed days.

i noticed there was a blank wall at mcdonald’s so i decided to make this fake poster of me and my friend. It’s now been 51 days since i hung it up. pic.twitter.com/5OTf5aR4vm

— JΞVH M (@Jevholution) September 3, 2018

According to Twitter, Maravilla’s reason for making the poster is that he simply noticed a blank wall in a McDonald’s and wanted to fill it. Below is the video of how the two students came up with the idea:

This tweet then became so viral, it caught the eye of Ellen Degeneres, who invited the Filipino American students on her show to talk about their stunt.

Best part?

The top brass at McDonald’s was so impressed with a recent “diversity” prank in Texas that the men responsible were rewarded with $25,000 each as part of an upcoming marketing campaign.

McDonald’s also tweeted back at Maravilla and Toledo: “You guys earned this dream.”

Maravilla added that McDonald’s did contact them after he tweeted about it, but instead of being punished, they told Degeneres that McDonald’s corporate executives said the poster would be taken down because of a planned renovation — but that the new store would reflect more of the community’s diversity.

“We looked around and saw these other posters on [the wall],” Maravilla told Ellen. “We saw that there’s different ethnicities. And we saw that there’s all these people having fun. So we decided to represent ourselves as Asians to be up there as well.”

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