In March, Taco Bell began airing three commercials in support of its new breakfast menu. In each, a series of men introduce themselves: “I’m Ronald McDonald.” “I’m Ronald McDonald.” “I am the Ronald McDonald.” The ads, which were directed by the Oscar-winning filmmaker Errol Morris, end with the men speaking in unison, “My name is Ronald McDonald, and I love Taco Bell’s new breakfast.” The fine print reads, “These Ronald McDonalds are not affiliated with McDonald’s Corporation and were individually selected as paid endorsers of Taco Bell breakfast, but man, they sure did love it.”
The campaign also includes a commercial, added in April, about an eighties-obsessed man ditching an Egg McMuffin, which Amy Merrick wrote about; the ads, taken together, are part of what some people on the Internet have called a “breakfast war” between Taco Bell and McDonald’s. Since the campaign began, the Taco Bell ads—the three about the Ronald McDonalds, plus the one mocking Egg McMuffins—have received more than three million views on YouTube. McDonald’s responded with a barrage of social-media barbs, including a Facebook photo of an enormous Ronald McDonald clown petting a Chihuahua with the caption, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” (Taco Bell’s spokesdog, Gidget, died in 2009.) McDonald’s also offered customers free coffee for two weeks.
In 2012, McDonald’s brought in ten billion dollars in breakfast sales, nearly a third of all fast-food breakfast sales nationwide, according to the research and consulting firm Technomic. Both McDonald’s and Yum Brands, which owns Taco Bell, reported earnings this week; it was too early to tell how Taco Bell’s breakfast offerings would impact McDonald’s, but that didn’t keep analysts from asking pointed questions about it. (When asked about Taco Bell, the McDonald’s C.E.O. said, obliquely, “We have not seen an impact relative to the most recent competitors that entered the space.”)
Taco Bell’s breakfast launch is the biggest marketing campaign in the company’s history, according to Chris Brandt, Taco Bell’s chief marketing officer. The company promotes it as a paradigm shift. “We had to disrupt people’s notion of what breakfast is,” Brandt told me. Disruption accomplished: the new menu includes an AM Crunchwrap (a sort of hexagonal burrito) and a waffle taco (a waffle cradling eggs and sausage that resembles a taco the way a Wiffle ball resembles a steel bullet).
Taco Bell also released a three-minute video documenting the story behind its new ads. Deutsch L.A., the advertising agency, contacted several real people with the name Ronald McDonald and flew some of them to Los Angeles for filming. “The first thought that went through my head when I got the e-mail was, Is this a scam?” Ronald McDonald, from Fort Myers, Florida—the one who calls himself the Ronald McDonald in the ads—told me; he is a Ronald McDonald, Jr., who goes by Ron. The McDonalds were already on set before they were told that the ad was for Taco Bell.
Using average people with famous names to endorse a brand isn’t a new idea. In 2012, ESPN ran ads in which Michael Jordan—a white, middle-aged man of average height—checks into a hotel, goes to a restaurant, and so on. Ronald McDonald has also already served as spokesperson for other fast-food chains. In 2002, Jack-in-the-Box released an ad in which a Ronald MacDonald (“Our attorneys didn’t mind the slight spelling difference,” the ad’s creator told Adweek) devours a Jack-in-the-Box burger. “When I was kid in junior high school, there was a Hardee’s across the street, and they put on their sign, ‘RONALD MCDONALD JR. STOPS HERE,’ ” McDonald, of Fort Myers, told me. “But I wasn’t compensated for that.”
I spoke with Morris to find about more about these Ronalds, who the filmmaker called the Fraternity of the McDonalds. Morris’s documentary about Donald Rumsfeld, “The Unknown Knowns,” was released in theatres the week that the Taco Bell ads went live nationwide. Morris has filmed over a thousand commercials throughout his career. His first campaign, “Mobile Judge,” featured a judge who travelled around the U.S. to declare 7-11’s quality over other convenience stores. Morris is the first to admit that Taco Bell’s Ronald McDonald campaign isn’t documentary journalism. Ads are meant to sell you something.
Morris didn’t come up with the idea for the Taco Bell ads—Deutsch L.A. came up with it, and hired Morris to film the shoot—but he liked the idea. “People who have worked with me for a long time have said that this was my very best material,” Morris told me. He used his signature Interrotron, a two-way camera that allows him to make direct eye contact with his subjects while they’re speaking to the monitor. (In 2012, I was very briefly in front of the Interrotron as part of a campaign that Morris shot for Our Time, a voting-advocacy group.)
“Usually on my monitor, I have the name taped of the person who I’m talking to, but there were no names this time around,” he told me. “I remember turning to my script supervisor, about to ask her, ‘What’s his name?’—and then suddenly realizing, Of course, I know this name.” There are nine hundred and fifty-nine Ronald McDonalds listed at WhitePages.com. According to Nametrix, an app that tracks statistics about proper names, “Ronald” peaked in popularity in 1943; the most common profession among Ronalds is air-traffic controller. Ronald McDonald the clown, initially portrayed by Willard Scott, made his first television appearance in 1963.
When he put the McDonalds in front of the Interrotron, Morris discovered much more about life as a Ronald McDonald than what appears in the commercials. Some of this material appears in the supplementary video about the ads, but most of it doesn’t. In the outtakes, one of the Ronald McDonalds told Morris that he had been married seven times. “He told me that the name is a real babe magnet,” Morris said. He recalled another McDonald telling him, “Taco Bell breakfast is insanely good. And I should know—I work at a maximum-security hospital for the criminally insane.”
Morris’s interest in names existed long before he encountered the Fraternity of the McDonalds. In the nineteen-seventies, Morris, then a graduate student at Princeton studying the history of science, became fascinated with the philosopher Saul Kripke’s theory about the connection between names and things in the world. “On the one hand, a name seems to attach us to the thing in and of itself,” Morris told me. “On the other hand, the name is rich with all sorts of cultural associations.” Morris recently tweeted, “Rigid designators v. descriptions. Ronald McDonald (the clown), the Ronald McDonalds (the persons), & ‘Ronald McDonald’ (the name).”
“There’s Ronald McDonald pride,” Morris told me. “Ronald McDonald II, Ronald McDonald III. I asked him”—a Ronald McDonald III who appears in the ads—“if he had a son, would he call him Ronald McDonald IV? And would he hope that his son would be Ronald McDonald V? And he said yes.” (Not all McDonalds feel this way: McDonald from Fort Myers has two sons whose names are Michael and Kyle.) “One person who had had his named changed still saw himself as Ronald McDonald,” Morris said. “It was some kind of fate. Inescapable.”
