The History Of McDonald's Iconic Jingle

Countless people around the world know the McDonald's jingle. You probably know it, too, and may even "love it." But while the biggest American fast food franchise on the planet (and one of the largest toy distributors) has managed to make a simple five-note melody as famous as its golden arches, the original tune was actually engineered to turn the then-struggling company around. First written by execs at a little German ad agency, "I'm Lovin' It" snowballed into a charting R&B single credited to a team of major pop stars. The jingle was a bid by an aging brand to reclaim its cultural relevance, and it worked so well that, more than 20 years later, it's by far the longest running advertising campaign McDonald's has ever run.

Originally, the jingle was just one of many pitches submitted to the fast food giant. At the turn of the millennium, McDonald's quarterly earnings were dropping. The chain was struggling to attract younger customers and bring in Europeans, who were understandably beef-shy as the mad cow disease epidemic raged on. Shareholders demanded a brand shakeup. So, in 2003, McDonald's launched an international request for proposals, specifying that it wanted ideas which incorporated hip-hop music.

Munich agency Heye & Partner came up with the slogan "ich liebe es" — "I love it" — and tasked fellow German company Mona Davis Music to write the melody. "Ba da, ba ba ba, I'm lovin' it" was Heye & Partner's big pitch to McDonald's. Though American advertising heavyweights had also thrown their hats into the ring, the German proposal won.

McDonald's kicked off the campaign in Heye & Partner's home country in the late summer before it hit the United States. The initial ads featured young people "lovin' it," playing basketball, hitting the waves with their surfboard, and DJing alone in their room, all while hip-hop duo Clipse raps about being "hungry for the music, gotta eat." And on the hook, singing the soon-to-be-famous jingle, is Justin Timberlake, who also pops up a few times in the commercials.

This wasn't the first time the song was unleashed on the public. McDonald's had already turned the jingle over to Timberlake. The singer worked with Pharrell Williams (who had been fired from the restaurant franchise three times prior) and members of Heye & Partner and Mona Davis Music to flesh out the melody into a full-fledged pop song. The track was produced by Williams and his Neptunes partner Chad Hugo and released as a Timberlake solo single in the fall of 2003. With Timberlake fresh off of his run with NSYNC and a smash hit debut album, the song leaked months before the commercial aired.

More than two decades later, the story of the McDonald's jingle is both a portrait of a bygone era and a foreshadowing of how much corporate branding would intertwine with pop culture. Justin Timberlake's collaboration with McDonald's came just a year before the Oscar-nominated documentary "Super Size Me" would put the fast food chain on the defensive, and yet Timberlake's solo career only got bigger. The singer would eventually (infamously) play the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show with Janet Jackson, and McDonald's even sponsored his European tour. But years later, Timberlake shared with British GQ, "I regret the McDonald's deal."

Since then, the Neptunes have broken up, the director of "Super Size Me" has died, and McDonald's has given permission to new advertising agencies to tweak the famous jingle in commercials. As the song became more closely associated with McDonald's than anything else, Timberlake's involvement has become easier to forget.

Nevertheless, in 2016, rumors swirled that Pusha T — one half of Clipse, who rapped on that original 2003 "I'm Lovin' It" commercial — was actually the original writer of the song. Representatives from Heye & Partner and Mona Davis Music came out of the woodwork to fervently deny the claim, but Pusha T himself was more ambiguous about his involvement and declined to speak further on it at the time.