Students Pull Off Fake McDonald’s Ad Prank That Goes Viral

When I visit a McDonald’s, I usually don’t pay too much attention to the decor around the lobby of the restaurant. Pretty sure most people don’t either. Therein lies the magic of this viral Mcdonald’s poster “prank.”

Jevh Maravilla, a student at the University of Houston, created a fake poster with his friend Christian Toledo to hang on the wall of a local McDonald’s. What they didn’t expect, however, was that the poster would hang there unnoticed for 51 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

In the behind-the-scenes video below, Maravilla reveals that they created the poster as a way to represent Asian-Americans in McDonald’s advertisements. The idea came as they noticed there were no Asians depicted in the store’s decorative images.

The process to hang the poster on the wall was pretty elaborate — from a campus photoshoot to editing realistic looking fries into the image. Maravilla even went out and bought a McDonald’s uniform so he could masquerade as an employee of the fast food chain while his friends hung the poster up.

For nearly two months, no one in the store took down the poster.

A noble goal behind a pretty hilarious prank. I wonder if the McDonald’s will just end up keeping this on their wall?