IW Group knows why a Happy Meal needs a disco

A miniature McDonald’s that turns into a disco is an unusually cheerful answer to a marketing brief. At the TinyTAN Happy Meal Magic Meetup, the restaurant became part of a playground for fans of BTS, whose animated counterparts appear as TinyTAN characters. There were games, photographs to take and people to meet. IW Group, the agency behind the experience, reports that 3,000 guests came through across three days. The miniature restaurant had acquired a second purpose: somewhere to belong.

That detail is a useful introduction to IW. The Los Angeles agency works in multicultural advertising and communications, a description that sounds rather more administrative than the work looks. Its assignments can produce a film, a creator collaboration, a media campaign or an elaborate room. The recurring question is wonderfully practical: what does this particular group of people already care about?

A disco is a clue

The September 2025 Los Angeles event was built around a fandom with its own habits and emotional calendar. Marketing Dive reported that several people on IW’s team were BTS or K-pop fans themselves. The experience took about 45 minutes to explore. Its appeal reached across ages and beyond Asian American audiences.

Production partner MoonLab describes a Happy Meal Box entrance, an interactive portal, collectible displays and a Friendship Room with sticker murals and make-your-own keychains. These are small decisions about how strangers can spend time together. A photograph offers an excuse to pose; a craft offers an excuse to linger. The brand supplies the setting, and visitors supply much of the activity.

My reading of the campaign is that its most transferable idea is the invitation. A marketer studying it should start with the social occasion the event created. Reproducing its props would miss the work that made those props meaningful.

The audience Imada could see

IW dates to 1990. Co-founder Bill Imada helped establish a business around reaching Asian American consumers, and the agency later expanded its work across other multicultural communities. His 2024 Advertising Hall of Fame biography credits Anheuser-Busch with awarding his first contract before the agency’s founding year. It also describes long relationships with corporate clients and community organizations.

Imada’s title today is chief connectivity officer. Nita Song is listed as chief momentum officer; Telly Wong leads creative and innovation. The titles have advertising-agency flourish, but connectivity is a useful word for this business. Cultural knowledge becomes commercially useful when someone can connect it to a client, a creative team and a way to reach an audience.

The service menu is broad: audience strategy, advertising, public relations, paid media, entertainment marketing and production. Its clients include McDonald’s, Lexus, Covered California, Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery. That range matters. A car shopper, a film audience and someone considering health coverage bring different decisions to the encounter. Cultural expertise has to serve the decision at hand.

Commercially, IW is a service business. Organizations commission the thinking and execution needed for campaigns. Its work sits among multicultural specialists and full-service agencies; ADWEEK’s 2025 multicultural shortlist also included alma, the community and DDB Latina Puerto Rico. Those are useful comparison points, although a shared awards category does not make their expertise interchangeable.

Bring the agency in before the cameras roll

One revealing assignment began unusually early. In a 2022 interview, Wong said Warner Bros. involved IW before Crazy Rich Asians went into production. Marketing agencies, he explained, would usually arrive much closer to release. Here, the studio wanted advice on building Asian American support while reaching a crossover audience.

IW treated the film as an occasion for community participation. Influencers, organizations and celebrities helped carry the message. The timing is the useful lesson: cultural advice could inform the approach while there was still room to shape it. Bringing specialists into an almost finished campaign gives them a narrower job.

“they didn’t find us, we found out about the awards, we submitted, we applied, and they selected us.”

Telly Wong, on IW’s 2022 Ad Age recognition, in POC Culture

Wong’s blunt account of entering the awards offers another lesson in agency economics. Even people paid to help clients get noticed must make a deliberate effort to be noticed themselves. Good work needs a route to its audience. Agencies are subject to their own advice.

The rabbit has to earn its technology

For McDonald’s Lunar New Year campaign in 2023, IW worked with creator Karen X Cheng on a television commercial, an augmented-reality filter and a virtual gathering space. The creative connected Cheng’s childhood memories with her present-day digital art. A QR code in the commercial let viewers move from watching the artwork to interacting with it.

The television production used neural radiance fields, or NeRF, to help create a three-dimensional scene. The technique had a narrative job: visualizing memory. A virtual space on Spatial also offered zodiac sculptures and events accessible through connected devices. The cultural occasion supplied a reason to visit.

Creative contributor Evan Stainsby’s project account adds the pleasingly fiddly details. The artwork had to work on a Times Square billboard and across print and merchandise. Rabbit animation involved moving whiskers, ears and subtle breathing. Physical activation concepts included rooms inspired by infinity mirrors. A single visual idea needed many versions, each suited to its surroundings.

That is where an integrated agency earns its place: keeping the idea recognizable while changing its form. The project won an experiential category at the ANA Multicultural Excellence Awards. Its more useful legacy for a working marketer may be the sequence of decisions that connected a personal memory to several ways of participating.

Attention has a unit of measurement

IW’s current portfolio also includes a Lexus film tied to Wicked: For Good. Director Jon M. Chu and his family take a ride home through an Oz-inflected world, seen through his young daughter’s eyes. IW reports that the ad reached 250,000 social views in its first two hours. That is evidence about how quickly the creative attracted viewing.

Covered California’s Rooted in Care takes another route, using stories of the AAPI diaspora and generative AI to animate archival photographs. The campaign puts cultural storytelling to work on trust in health coverage. The contrast with a K-pop event is instructive: the same agency’s expertise must adapt to the seriousness of the choice a client wants people to make.

At the company level, ADWEEK’s December 2025 coverage reported revenue of $24 million, up from $23 million, and named IW its Multicultural Agency of the Year. These figures describe the agency’s business. They belong in a different column from event attendance, social views and a client’s sales. Combining them into one glowing claim would make the story less useful.

What to borrow before you book the venue

Here is my practical reading of IW’s work. Invite people who know the audience into the brief early. Find a recognizable memory, habit or shared enthusiasm. Give participants something worth doing. Then choose the medium that makes the activity easy to join.

The resource commitment extends beyond the visible ad: creator time, production, media distribution and, for live work, a venue and operating team. A useful buying brief separates those pieces and specifies what success means. An event designed for gathering needs different evaluation from a campaign designed to generate inquiries.

This approach depends on a credible connection between the brand and the community. It becomes harder to justify when participation takes more effort than the audience’s interest warrants, or when spectacle crowds out the product decision. The tiny McDonald’s makes sense because people have a reason to walk inside. The disco is what happens after the invitation works.