McDonaldland was the name of McDonald’s advertising universe introduced in 1971 with Ronald McDonald and other characters.
The campaign imagined a colorful fantasy setting populated by branded figures, including Mayor McCheese, the Hamburglar, and Grimace. It gave McDonald’s a shared story world that could appear in television commercials, in-store materials, promotions, and children’s merchandise.
McDonaldland was designed especially to appeal to children and families, but it also helped organize the company’s growing cast of mascots. The characters represented different aspects of the restaurant’s menu or identity, turning advertising into a recurring narrative rather than a series of unrelated product announcements.
McDonaldland is sometimes confused with the name of a single restaurant or playground. It was primarily a fictional advertising setting. Its characters and visual style changed over time, and several figures were later retired, but the name remains one of the clearest markers of McDonald’s early-1970s branding strategy.