- Michael Gebert
Any argument about who’s had the biggest influence on food in Chicago—Achatz or Trotter? Szathmary or Banchet?—can immediately be shut down once someone makes mention of Ray Kroc. The shake-machine salesman built McDonald’s into the epitome of a worldwide fast-food empire. If you think that’s a bad thing, it probably is in some ways. But I was in Budapest a year after Communism fell. There were two McDonald’s there, and they were filled with locals. Did McDonald’s have them hooked on greasy burger-and-fries crack already? Maybe. But it was also because until McDonald’s arrived, only tourists with hard currency and Party big shots were able to eat in restaurants. An icon of capitalism brought eating out to ordinary people when 45 years of supposed Socialist rule had not.
It’s also interesting in terms of the history of McDonald’s marketing. McDonald’s most famous ad campaign—”You deserve a break today”—was created by Chicago ad agency Needham Harper & Steers, later consumed by DDB, and was most memorably used in this Stan Freberg-esque song-and-dance commercial (fun fact: cast members include John Amos of Good Times, and Robert Ridgely, who would go on to play the medieval executioner in Blazing Saddles and the Colonel in Boogie Nights, among many other parts):
