Filipino-Americans Jevh Maravilla and Christian Toledo put up a fake poster of themselves in a McDonald's restaurant that went unnoticed for two months. Photo: Twitter @Jevholution
Filipino-Americans Jevh Maravilla and Christian Toledo put up a fake poster of themselves in a McDonald's restaurant that went unnoticed for two months. Photo: Twitter @Jevholution

Two Filipino-Americans were each given US$25,000 by McDonald’s after a fake poster of themselves they put in a branch in Houston, Texas went viral.

College students Jevh Maravilla and Christian Toledo were invited to appear with Ellen DeGeneres after the talk show host heard of their viral tweet about putting up a fake poster in a McDonald’s restaurant, ABS-CBN News reported.

Maravilla’s tweet said that he and Toledo put up the poster, which went unnoticed by restaurant staff for two months. The tweet gained more than one million likes and generated over 259,000 retweets in only two weeks.

The two students appeared on the Ellen show and talked about how they were able to pull off the prank after they noticed that although the restaurant had posters showing people of different races, there were none showing Asians.

They photographed themselves in a suitably cheesy pose outside a local neighborhood events center, edited the picture to match the style of the ones in the restaurant, and ordered a giant print online.

In July, they managed to sneak the poster onto a vacant internal wall using adhesive tape. Two months later, it was still there, unnoticed until Maravilla’s tweet went viral in September.

They were each given US$25,000 courtesy of McDonald’s and will be part of the company’s upcoming marketing campaign highlighting diversity.

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