A Pioneer: In Marketing to Kids
Speaking of reinventions, before Ronald was Ronald he was Bozo the Clown, star of his own television show, “Bozo’s Circus.” Tapping Bozo’s popularity with kids, McDonald’s hired the clown to attend the opening of a store in Alexandria, Virginia. Children and their families lined the streets by the thousands, purchasing food from McDonald’s in order to visit the clown.
This in-person promotion was an extension of the commercials Bozo the Clown delivered during the local version of his weekly television show, which was sponsored by McDonald’s.
Bozo proved a talented spokesperson for McDonald’s. In just three years of marketing with Bozo, local sales grew 30 percent and exceeded McDonald’s national average by 50 percent. The Washington, D.C.-area franchises became the largest in the country with an advertising budget that exceeded that of the national corporation. And most of this budget was spent promoting the clown.
Despite Bozo’s success promoting McDonald’s to children on television, the Washington network dropped Bozo’s Circus in 1963, leaving McDonald’s without a pitchman. They quickly decided it was time the store had a spokes-clown of its own.
So in 1963, rookie television announcer Willard Scott suited up as Ronald McDonald and the clown made its own commercial debut.
Though hard to imagine as extraordinary today given the ubiquity of advertising to children, in his first commercial Ronald made a direct appeal not to potential adult patrons but to children. The approach bucked all marketing conventions…and it worked.
Before long McDonald’s had embraced the clown nationwide and attached its fortune to Ronald’s star, ushering Scott out in favor of the trimmer Coco the Clown of Barnum and Bailey fame.
Soon the move would blow-up…literally.
In 1965, after some initial internal disagreement about the benefits of national television advertising, McDonald’s accepted an offer from NBC to sponsor the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. The 3.5 minute ad buy featuring Ronald gave the corporation an eight percent sales jump during a time of year where sales typically declined.
The following year, pleased with the successful gamble, McDonald’s for the first time sponsored a, shall we say, super-sized Ronald balloon in the parade.
The return on investment was so impressive that in 1967 the corporation broke into athletics sponsorships with a new postseason football game that would later be called the Super Bowl.
And that was just the beginning for a corporation that today spends $1.2 billion on marketing just in the U.S. with much of that amount being spent advertising directly to children…namely through its clown mascot.