When an Asian-American college student noticed a lack of diversity at his local McDonald’s restaurant, he took matters into his own hands.
In mid July, Jevh Maravilla created a fake poster for the fast food chain starring himself and his fellow Filipino friend Christian Toledo and hung it at a Pearland, Texas location. After the ad had stayed up untouched for nearly two months, Maravilla came clean on Twitter. The tweet has now been retweeted more than 250,000 times and liked nearly 1 million times.
“i noticed there was a blank wall at mcdonald’s so i decided to make this fake poster of me and my friend. It’s now been 51 days since i hung it up,” he wrote on Sept. 2 along with photo evidence of his prank.
As a senior at the University of Houston studying media production, creating the poster was no problem—Maravilla and Toledo put it together in a month, he told CNN. But getting the poster into the restaurant was the hard part. Maravilla says he purchased a McDonald’s uniform shirt at a thrift store for $7 and snuck the fake ad onto the blank wall with the help of Toledo and one other friend.
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In a YouTube video he created detailing his plans, Maravilla showed off his disguise, which also included a tie, a faux badge and a walkie talkie.
Maravilla wrote on Twitter that he was inspired by the box office hit Crazy Rich Asians, the first major Hollywood production in years to boast an all-Asian cast.
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“We both can’t believe how much attention this has been getting. I hope this can open the eyes to not just McDonald’s, but other major companies can embrace different ethnicities,” Maravilla told CNN.
And their efforts paid off. The owner of the local Texas McDonald’s says she plans on keeping up the poster for some time.
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“We take pride in highlighting diversity in every aspect of our restaurants. We applaud these students’ creativity and hope to see them in our restaurants again soon,” owner Mariselle Quijano told CNN.
A representative for McDonald’s did not immediately respond to request for comment, but CNN reports that the company supports Quijano’s decision.
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