Lost Racist "You Better Don't" McDonalds Ad

There's at least three Subway ads from that period of time which explicitly call out Chicken Selects:


youtu.be/wU79WkR-OtQ 


youtu.be/W0Fr65iN2Fo?t=1120


youtu.be/SSsc6PjAdfM?t=349 (this one even has Jared quote "stay away from my Chicken Selects" - not an exact line from the ads we have I don't think but probably just a paraphrase anyway)

The doc is now up to date: docs.google.com/document/d/1GmI2iVr-zcdlQj_k4KUQ7YVSs2IqbYIaVEUYLT2FPow/edit

Interesting how the Beth Malone/"green girl" ad is the most prominent so far, but we haven't yet found any airings later than September 22 for that one. It's possible some of these just had a shorter planned lifespan than others. 

Basically, I'm now quite sceptical that McDonald's intentionally pulled or modified YBD based on criticism. There could very well be another variant as described on some of those forums, but to have shot and edited this after the ad was already airing seems like a needless amount of effort. Also worth noting that both versions of the "mama" ad were still airing after that forum post about the alt version of YBD, which kinda torches the theory that the "mama" ad was edited to deliberately remove those lines for the same reason. 

Considering there's an alt version of the Beth Malone ad, and two in an office setting with the same guy, it's more likely there were just a couple versions from the get-go. 

I discovered new Chicken Select adverts not previously accounted for here. So that’s fun! Still haven’t found the commercial we’re after, though.

After sifting through a ton of commercials from Fall 2004 (and finding only what had already been found), I switched up my search and decided to try and find if any websites, outside of forums, talked about the ad.

What really piqued my interest was the note at the bottom of one of the Green Lady’s commercials - “archived for edutorial use via ad-age.com and adtothebone.com”

Ad-age.com no longer exists, but I used Wayback Machine and found that it served as an archive for literally every commercial. Like, it hosted every commercial from every major brand. And the site was broken down by month and year.

I ended up finding references to several McDonald’s Defend My Chicken commercials during Fall ‘04, but of course the videos are no longer available using Wayback Machine.

I then discovered that ad-age.com is now called adland.tv. And it has everything that ad-age.com had! Using this site I found every ad we’ve already crowdsourced so far (office guy, green girl, guitar guy, and even both the mama and non-mama version of the lady we’re after).

In addition, I was able to find new Chicken Select commercials, which as I said before, haven’t been documented here so far.

Here they are:

Mom & Daughter 

Construction Workers 

Sports Fan 

Volleyball

Goalie

The one thing about these videos is they got posted online at some point after they aired on TV (which means it's not clear when each aired). So that doesn't help us narrow down an exact date for the You Betta Don't commercial. It does give credence to the fact that McDonald's was all in on this particular campaign. On the one hand, now there is even more heaps of evidence that the You Betta Don't commercial 100% exists. On the other, given how much exposure Chicken Selects got from all these other commercials, it wouldn't surprise me if McDonald's pulled the advert very quickly after the negative response. 

One other interesting thing I found is that McDonald's was awarded Marketer of the Year by Ad Age Magazine in 2004 - this despite the online chatter about how bad the You Betta Don't commercial was. 

Amazing find! Looking over them, I've come up with a theory...

Maybe the ads about "defending your chicken" were part of the 'first wave' of advertising in August, the two Olympics ones both highlight chicken defense. This along with the tidbit from early in the search about seeing it air during the Olympics in August makes me think that's the most likely place we'll find You Better Don't, or at least it's my theory that it was among the earliest ads in this campaign.

Another observation... every Chicken Selects commercial is clearly aimed at an adult demographic, but the first one there ("Mom & Daughter"/"Between Us") is the one closest to the expected "defend your chicken" format.

I'm starting to think that the Olympic ones were there own set of commercials. I also feel like the airplane one isn't Olympics because most mentions are from September-October which the Olympics would have been over by now.

The "mama" ad is kind of a hybrid between the "defend your chicken" campaign and whatever wider Disney promotion they had going on at the time. I think the plane setting in YBD could just be that, the setting of the ad, because some of the other Olympic-branded ones have nothing to do with the games themselves either.