How An Olympics Promotion Backfired And Cost McDonald's Money

Food marketing is easily one of the most important things in the world of restaurants. While good marketing can net a chain publicity and great sales, unwise marketing can cause serious damage to both a restaurant's reputation and its wallet. This was recently demonstrated by Red Lobster's endless shrimp debacle, but it can also be seen in countless historical marketing campaigns, including McDonald's limited-time deal that coincided with the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.

The promotion itself was quite fun and fitting for its time; McDonald's customers across the country were given a card with a certain Olympic event on it, and if the United States won a medal in that event, the cardholders would get a free item from the chain. For gold medals, the corresponding cardholders would get a Big Mac. For events in which the U.S. won the silver or bronze medal, customers were given french fries or a soft drink, respectively.

The promotion was quite popular at first and garnered great publicity for both McDonald's and that year's Olympics. However, due to the home athletes' dominance during the Olympics, McDonald's fun and popular marketing campaign wound up being, at the time, the most costly promotion in the organization's history. While it's not exactly known how much it cost the Illinois-based burger chain, experts theorize the final price tag was somewhere in the millions.

If what the athletes at the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games ate is anything to go by, it's unlikely that those Americans competing at the 1984 Olympics were operating on a steady diet of McDonald's. However, their impressive results played a key role in McDonald's notorious financial blunder. Due to the ongoing Cold War, the Soviet Union and its allies boycotted the games. This meant that the American athletes had an absurdly strong showing. They won 30 bronze medals, 61 silver medals, and 83 gold medals, totaling 174 medals overall.

While the 1984 Olympics consisted of more than 200 events, there was a pretty high likelihood that any card a customer received from McDonald's would warrant some sort of free menu item. Because McDonald's patrons were given a new Olympic event card with each purchase, and the fact that the promotion started weeks before the games began, it became an incredibly difficult promotion for the chain to keep up. Some McDonald's locations were even reported as running out of Big Macs by the time the Olympic Games reached their conclusion.

All in all, McDonald's 1984 Olympics campaign has gone down in infamy for how economically unwise it was. Many fast food chains have clearly sought to avoid a similar disaster. While it is still common for fast food establishments across the globe to do special Olympic promotions every four years — for example, the release of Pizza Hut Japan's Decathlon Meat Pizza — nothing has compared to McDonald's 1984 "U.S. Win, You Win" campaign.