Anyone old enough to remember the old jingle “Great time, great taste. That’s why this is my place” knows that there was only one thing better than a meal at McDonald’s. The ads.
They were little slices of life. Some were sweet; some, bittersweet. Nevertheless, each one was a classic, from the American spot about the little boy who resented his new baby brother and claimed “I had blue eyes first,” all the way to our very own story about the senile old man and his granddaughter Gina—no, wait—Karen.
Now, comes a fine homage to this tradition, “First Love”.
With the Eraserheads’ “Ang Huling El Bimbo” providing instant nostalgia, the narrative takes us to the Eighties. In this time of neon-colored innocence, boy meets girl; boy falls in love with girl, and boy turns into a grown man who faces the fact that their love was never meant to be.
The ad was remarkable for many reasons; among them, the production design. Every detail was spot-on, from the old menu board to the tsunami-do on women’s heads.
Melanie Montemayor, McDonald’s Product Marketing, said that “First Love” required much effort to recreate a typical McDo restaurant from that period. It even required international collaboration between the local team and Oakbrook (the US head office).
DDB’s executive creative director Teeny Gozum said, “Mr. George Yang’s personal photo albums were brought out of storage to ensure that we got the interiors of the stores—color of the chairs, menu board design, crew uniforms—were exact to that time.
“Old fashion photos from the 80’s were revived to get the right hairdo, clothes and overall style of the main cast and even the extras. We even got cars from the 80’s (Lancer box type, etc.) so the cars passing in the opening scene would also look believable.”
And believe, consumers did. The ad seemed to trigger memories of everyone’s first love en masse. During your next visit to McDo, count the number of misty-eyed grownups dipping their fries into the hot-fudge sundaes.
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