Chris Edwards, a creative director in the Boston office of Arnold Worldwide, was working late one night when he got an email from someone– “I still don’t know who sent it,” Edwards said–instructing him to check out a clip on YouTube. Edwards clicked on the link provided and saw a video of two guys standing in front of a McDonald’s rapping about Chicken McNuggets. “I was dying. I thought it was so funny,” Edwards recalled, “and I thought, ‘What can we do with this? I have to get this on TV somehow.’ “
With a little help from the Avid department at Arnold, Edwards was able to download the clip. He took it home and played with it in iMovie. Originally, the video was :42. Edwards whittled it down and realized it would work well as a :30 spot.
As it turns out, McDonald’s franchises in the New York regional market needed a TV spot to promote an Extra Value Meal, so Edwards presented the idea for the “YouTube McNuggets Guys” commercial to his client. “They were very open to evolving the I’m Lovin’ It campaign,” Edwards shared. “The way I positioned it to them was, ‘What’s more I’m Lovin’ It than your consumers making this video on their own without being asked to do it.’ ”
While the client was enthusiastically onboard, there was a rather large hurdle to clear: Edwards and his colleagues at Arnold had to track down the guys who made the video and see if they would be amenable to it being used as a commercial. “I was crossing my fingers because I wasn’t sure if they were going to be like, ‘No, we’re not sellouts!'” Edwards related.
After a few weeks of searching, the agency found the guys in Chicago. Fernando Sosa and Thomas Middleditch were revealed as the two seen performing in the video–Sosa did the beat boxing, Middleditch handled the rapping. Their friend Matt Malinsky directed and shot it.
They are all comedic actors. Currently, they perform with iO Theater (once known as Improv Olympic.)
‘Stunned disbelief’
How did the guys react when they learned that an advertising agency was interested in turning their no-budget video, which had been made about a year before, into a commercial for McDonald’s? “With stunned disbelief,” Malinsky said.
Explaining how the video came to be, Malinksy related that he, Sosa and Middleditch were taking classes at Second City and performing in student shows at the time. Backstage prior to one of the performances, Sosa was eating McNuggets. Middleditch walked in, spotted his friend chowing down on the McNuggets and launched into an off-the-cuff rap song. Sosa started beat boxing, and their teacher and the director of their student show thought it was hilarious. Sosa and Middleditch wound up opening the show with their McNuggets rap, and the audience ate it up.
Another teacher suggested the duo make a video for the song, and they asked Malinsky to direct.
Malinsky shot the video on a Canon ZR60 camcorder and recorded sound with a relatively inexpensive shotgun mic. The setting was a street corner next to a McDonald’s in Chicago’s Wrigleyville neighborhood. In fact, to the left of Sosa and Middleditch, you can see Wrigley Field in the background.
Malinsky trained his camera on the guys, doing a few takes close up, at mid range and at long range. He chose not to do a lot of camera moves. “It was a choice I made based on the fact that the physicality they break into in a couple segments of the video is already dynamic enough,” Malinsky said, “so I didn’t want to take away from any of that.”
Original tapes
Edwards was relieved to find out that Malinksy had held onto the original mini-DV tapes he had shot. The agency was able to use them to make the finished spot as opposed to the lesser-quality QuickTime Edwards had initially begun working with.
Edwards shares credit for the final cut of the spot with editors Ellen Wallett and Josh Sklaroff of Boston’s Panache Editorial. Mike Secher of Soundtrack, Boston, did the audio mix.
While the video he discovered on YouTube is simple, Edwards immediately recognized the genius of it, and in a day and age when some advertising agency creatives are threatened by the idea of average folk moving in on their territory, Edwards was eager to take advantage and tap into new talent. “What we try to do is reach our target, and my job is to recognize opportunities that will reach our target and generate more opportunities for my client. I didn’t think of this idea, I didn’t write these crazy lyrics, and I didn’t find someone to act it out. But I was able to recognize an opportunity and make it happen,” Edwards said, noting, “I’m not threatened. They’re helping me to do my job better.”
Look for the “YouTube McNuggets Guys” spot to expand into markets well beyond New York in the coming months.
Is it possible that Arnold might team up with the McNuggets crew on future projects?
“We’re not really sure what we would do. It is tricky because it would have to be exactly the right opportunity, and it would have to feel right. Once you start scripting these guys, it might not be the same,” Edwards mused. “But if the opportunity arises, then yeah, we would like to talk to them.”
