Students smuggle giant poster into McDonald's in stunt to increase Asian representation

'All races deserve recognition'

Two men smuggled a huge picture of themselves into a branch of McDonald’s after they realised there were no Asians in the posters on the walls.

University of Houston students Jevh Maravilla and Christian Toledo found a lack of Asian representation in McDonald’s advertising, so they decided to take matters into their own hands.

The duo took a picture of themselves holding a McDonald’s burger and fries on their university campus, before editing the picture to mimic the style of the posters in the fast food restaurant.

Once the poster had been delivered from the printers, the next challenge was getting it into the branch of McDonald’s in Houston, Texas.

Maravilla, who is of Filipino heritage, found a McDonald's uniform in a thrift shop, so he bought it. He added a badge (with the name Jeff Bergara and the title of ‘regional interior coordinator’), a tie and a walkie-talkie, and he was ready to pull off the stunt.

“I wore a jacket covering my uniform and waited until the coast was clear from any employees,” Maravilla explains in his video documenting the whole process.

“Once the coast was clear, I would take off my jacket and I would tell Christian and Cassandra [Batang, another friend who was helping] how to position it.”

The team waited in McDonald’s for over an hour before the right opportunity presented itself, but when it did, they acted swiftly, sticking the poster on the wall in a matter of seconds.

They’d applied an adhesive to the back of the poster that would make it easy to take the picture off the wall, as they were conscious of not vandalising the restaurant.

The trio rapidly left the restaurant, with Cassandra revealing she was “shaking”.

“Oh my god, guys,” said Maravilla. “Mission accomplished! It was all so very exciting.”

The poster was put up on 13 July and has stayed up since, seemingly without anyone from McDonald’s realising how it had come to be.

Maravilla’s tweet about the poster has gone viral, racking up over 730,000 likes and garnering thousands of replies from people impressed by the stunt.

“I can't remember seeing something that made me this happy in a long time,” wrote Tom Segura.

“This is iconic,” added another Twitter user.

Although it was fun, Maravilla has a serious message behind the stunt: “All races deserve recognition,” he says.