McDonald's is the latest corporation to try to cash in on the YouTube phenomenon, and the two moonlighting comedians who threw together a Chicken McNuggets video and slapped it on the Internet for fun are lovin' it.
Boston advertising agency Arnold is using the video, created by Fernando Sosa, a 26-year-old who does data entry by day, and Matt Malinsky, a 35-year-old IT manager, both of whom hustle jokes in their spare time at Chicago comedy spots, in a commercial for McDonald's in New York. The grainy, year-and-a-half old clip features Sosa and another man who is now working on a cruise ship amateurishly rapping about Chicken McNuggets, and is another example of how content created by the masses is catching the eye of professionals in the advertising world.
In fact, nearly everything about how the ad's production is a departure from tradition in the high-stakes world of advertising, where clients like McDonald's pay ad agencies like Arnold millions of dollars for well-planned campaigns that favor tested slogans in favor of edgy ways of presenting messages. In this case, though, planning went out the window, and it paid off.
"I can tell you I considered doing the corporate thing to it, but [Arnold] wanted to try to make it organic and let it live in the space from which it came from so people could relate to it more. They convinced me otherwise," said Ken Ebo, McDonald's Corp.'s New York marketing director and the executive who approved the ad. He said the commercial, which has been running on about seven New York TV stations for two weeks, has helped increase sales of McDonald's chicken nugget meals "and the buzz that has been generated has been substantial. I've heard radio station DJs chattering about it. You can't pay for that."
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