How McDonald's 1984 Olympics Marketing Campaign Became A Fiasco

It's not too uncommon for fast food to be promoted by athletes. You may remember seeing something about pizza chain Little Caesar's being the official pizza sponsor of the NFL, or you may have seen Subway bringing out everyone from Tom Brady to Steph Cury to promote its new "Eat Fresh Refresh" campaign (via Nation's Restaurant News). While some cynics may take aim at the idea of athletes promoting "junk food," the relationship between fast food and sporting events isn't a twenty-first-century idea. Burger juggernaut McDonald's, for example, was a key sponsor for the 1984 Olympic Games — and the Golden Arches sought to make a quick buck off of it too.

As commercials leading up to the Games announced, McDonald's customers stood a chance to win free food, drinks, or even a cash prize every time the United States won a medal in an event. Opportunity Marketing explains that certain prizes were tied to certain medals — for example, if the United States won silver in swimming, customers could win free fries or, if the medal was gold, a free Big Mac. The concept itself sounded great on paper: Customers would flock to their local McDonald's and buy as many promotional cards as they could, thus earning McDonald's a hefty profit worth all the gold medals in the games.

As luck would have it, McDonald's had unwittingly set up its own colossal blunder.

As History tells us, it was in 1984 that the Soviet Union announced it would be boycotting the Olympic Games. No matter what the reason, political or otherwise, this meant that a very large chunk of the competition — one that was poised to go against the United States as its main rival — was now nonexistent. The United States, according to LAist, would go on to literally bring home the gold, earning 174 medals during the entirety of the Olympic Games.

While this was great news for the United States, recall McDonald's promise: Every time the United States won a medal, customers would get free food — and people were more than ready to cash in on that promise. Customers, clutching promotional cards and hungry for free Big Macs and fries, swarmed their local McDonald's in droves. So great was the number of people cashing in their cards that a 1984 report from The New York Times claims that 6,600 McDonald's effectively ran out of Big Macs to sate the hungry crowd. As Americans across the country cheered the United States' sweeping victory with mouths full of fries, McDonald's found itself basically shoveling out free food without making any profit from it.

Although McDonald's never exactly came out and gave an estimation of how much it lost, the Los Angeles Times reported that the company only stated that while the promotion was wildly successful, it was also the most costly.

"You people are pigs!" screams the clown, in between sobbing and taking long drags of his cigarette. He turns to the TV, furious, his voice dripping with disgust. "I personally am gonna spit in every fiftieth burger."

No, this wasn't Ronald McDonald breaking out into a hysterical rant as he watched his company hand out thousands of dollars in free food. This was the raving of Krusty the Clown from "The Simpsons," whose 1992 episode ("Lisa's First Word") parodied McDonald's extreme miscalculation during its 1984 Olympics promotion. The promotion has become something of a gag for those who remember it, a moment in which a symbol of American culture seemed to celebrate a stunning American victory with unfiltered, raw American consumerism. It was the ultimate display of American power — albeit one that was completely unintended.

As for McDonald's, the company seemed to have no hard feelings at the Olympic Games for its blunder and remained a steady partner of the event for many years following. It was in 2017, CNN Business tells us, that the Golden Arches and the Games parted ways, with the split supposedly being a mutual agreement. Unfortunately, if you had dreams of McDonald's ever doing anything like its 1984 promotion again, it seems that such a dream was a once-in-a-lifetime event.