McDonald’s Awards $25,000 Ad Campaign To Poster Pranksters Jevh Maravilla And Christian Toledo

Some pranksters end up in jail, but some, like 21-year-old Jehv Maravilla and 25-year-old Christian Toledo, are just lucky and too creative it would be a waste of talent to lock them up in a cell.

The two McDonald’s customers went viral after pulling a prank at a Pearland, Texas, McDonald’s restaurant.

Maravilla told KHOU 11 that the posters on the wall of the restaurant feature other races, but there were no Asians so they decided that it was their duty to put themselves up there. The idea was to create a fake McDonald’s promotional poster and hang this up on a blank space on the wall. The goal is to promote Asian representation.

The two Filipino-Americans started working on the scheme after coming up with the idea in June. The ruse involved buying McDonald’s uniforms from Goodwill and creating fake “Regional Interior Coordinator” ID badges so they can have the poster placed in the store.

They used a timer to take a picture of them eating McDonald’s, and documented the entire process, including how they edited the picture to look like the others in the store, in a YouTube video. They also split the $80 to buy the poster from Office depot.

The two successfully installed the poster on the wall. They admitted being worried about getting in trouble after hanging the poster but nothing bad happened.

The sign, in fact, remained on the wall unnoticed for 51 days until the pair talked about it on Twitter. The tweet became viral and has been retweeted more than 100,000 times.

Now, Maravilla and Toledo are getting rewarded for their creative prank. McDonald’s, which has since learned about the fake poster, was so impressed with the “diversity” prank that it decided to reward each of the duo $25,000 as part of an upcoming marketing campaign.

Television host Ellen Degeneres made the announcement during an episode of The Ellen Degeneres Show that aired on Monday, Sept. 17.

“McDonald’s loves customers like you,” DeGeneres said. “And they’re committed to diversity and want to represent all their customers. So they’re going to use the two of you in a marketing campaign. Not only that, but since you’re in the campaign they need to pay you, right? So you’re each getting a check for $25,000 dollars.”

McDonald’s also tweeted a special message for the duo.

You guys earned this dream.???? Looking forward to more work from the best “Regional Interior Coordinators” we’ve ever had!????

— McDonald’s (@McDonalds) September 19, 2018