Where's the Beef?

1984

Date: 9 January 1984 · Place: Chicago, Illinois (filmed) · Figures: Cliff Freeman, Dancer Fitzgerald Sample copywriter · Joe Sedelmaier, director · Clara Peller, performer · Walter Mondale, Democratic presidential candidate · Tags: Catchphrase, Television, Politics 01. Eighty-One Years Old Cliff Freeman writes the spot at Dancer Fitzgerald Sample in New York. Director Joe Sedelmaier casts Clara Peller, an eighty-one-year-old former manicurist he has used in earlier commercials, and shoots in Chicago in late 1983. The thirty-second spot for Wendy's airs nationally on 9 January 1984. Peller has emphysema and can barely get the line out on take. Sedelmaier dubs it cleaner in post. The line is three words and a fluffy bun. 02. The Mondale Use Within a month Where's the Beef? is on T-shirts, novelty records, and the lips of late-night hosts. Wendy's same-store sales jump thirty-one percent for the quarter. On 11 March 1984, during a Democratic primary debate in Atlanta, Walter Mondale turns to Gary Hart and asks where the beef is in his New Ideas platform. The clip dominates the next news cycle. Mondale wins the nomination. He loses forty-nine states to Reagan. "When I hear your new ideas, I'm reminded of that ad: Where's the beef?" — Walter Mondale to Gary Hart, Democratic primary debate, Atlanta, 11 March 1984 03. End of the Endorsement In 1985 Peller appears in a Prego spaghetti sauce ad declaring she has finally found the beef. Wendy's drops her for crossing brand lines. She dies in August 1987 at age eighty-five. The structure of the joke, an old woman demanding the missing thing, persists as the basic template of every short-form video question meme that follows. Sources • Bob Garfield, 'And Now a Few Words From Me: Advertising's Leading Critic Lays Down the Law' (McGraw-Hill, 2003) • New York Times, 'Clara Peller, 85, Star of Wendy's TV Spots, Dies', 13 August 1987 • Jonathan Mahler, 'The Long History of Where's the Beef', Slate, 30 January 2014