McDonald's adopted its first national television advertising campaign in 1966.
The campaign marked an important shift from local restaurant promotion to coordinated national branding. By this period, McDonald's had expanded far beyond its original California base, so television offered a way to present a consistent identity to customers across the United States.
The company's branding history is often associated mainly with the Golden Arches and Ronald McDonald, but national advertising helped connect those elements into a unified public image. Television also made jingles, characters, and repeated visual motifs central to the company's marketing.
This date is distinct from the later creation of McDonaldland and the introduction of Ronald McDonald as a major advertising character. Those developments strengthened the campaign style after McDonald's had already begun national television promotion.