McDonald’s, in celebration of National Hamburger Day this Saturday, tested the marketing potential of live video on Facebook. McDonald’s first promoted it’s Facebook Live video to its nearly 65 million Facebook followers with 2 separate posts starting Wednesday afternoon. Clearly, McDonald’s was going for humor, but the artist featured in the promo and live video is absolutely creepy in his attempt at channelling his inner Bob Ross. It is funny and worth watching!

McDonald’s idea was to have it look like a Bob Ross style artist painted 3 hamburger related pictures in real-time on Facebook Live in celebration of National Hamburger Day. The person playing the Bob Ross character was actor/comedian “Bevin”.

Here is how McDonald’s promoted it’s Facebook Live video:

Here are the video’s that ran live on McDonald’s Facebook page. For some reason the live video was recorded as 2 separate clips:

The opening 8 minute clip had close to 8,000 views, 683 likes, 281 shares and 408 comments as of this writing. This was followed by a 42 minute clip which had nearly 20,000 views, 1,500 likes, 160 shares and 2,118 comments. This is only mildly successful considering that McDonald’s has 65 million followers.

A couple funny reactions to the Facebook Live video in the comments:

I give credit for McDonald’s going out of box in testing Facebook Live for marketing its product and using humor was a good idea.

However, Facebook needs to let brands reach more of their followers with their posts! People “like” brands because they want their posts to appear in their news feeds. Why Facebook, in the interest of decluttering people’s news feeds takes it upon themselves to only show a fraction of the posts from people and brands that people themselves chose to follow is beyond reason. With 65 million followers of McDonald’s on Facebook the Live videos should have been seen by millions.

A better approach for Facebook, in my opinion, would be to give people options themselves to prioritizing people and brands as they see their posts. Let people choose and allow brands that have worked so hard and spent so much money on promoting their Facebook pages and growing their followers benefit from this.