The advertising campaign featuring Mac Tonight was created around 1986 for California-only McDonald's affiliates by the Los Angeles advertising company Davis, Johnson, Mogul & Colombatto. This promotional campaign was intended to encourage people to consume McDonald's products at night and to build loyalty with an audience of baby boomers. The agency therefore decided to create some commercials that recalled an atmosphere of the mid-twentieth century and were accompanied by popular music of the time (a choice dictated by the need to follow the fashion of the musical revival of the fifties). After selecting one of the different proposed variants of a song featuring the backing track of Mack the Knife, originally written by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, and later made famous in the USA by Bobby Darin in 1959, the creators of the advertising campaign decided not to He does show real characters and / or celebrities in his commercials, but opted instead for an anthropomorphic crooner with a crescent-shaped head wearing a black suit and sunglasses. The character, who in the commercials plays a grand piano on top of a floating cloud or a giant Big Mac (the hamburger after which he takes his name), was inspired by Max Headroom.

According to McDonald's, the Mac Tonight ad campaign was "very successful". Nation's Restaurant News also claimed that Mac Tonight helped increase the budget at various McDonald's restaurants in California by more than 10% between 1986-1987. An audience of fifteen hundred would see an individual dressed as Mac Tonight inside. a McDonald's restaurant in Los Angeles. Although some feared that Mac Tonight was too much embodying the spirit of the US West Coast, in February 1987 it was decided to extend the campaign nationwide. The new promotional launch was inaugurated during the month of August of that year in Boca Raton, and attracted an audience of a thousand people in the Californian town. A line of toys depicting the character was also created for children's menus.

According to an Ad Watch survey done in September 1987, the number of consumers who remembered McDonald's ads earlier than any other competitor would have doubled from the previous month, and was higher than that of McDonald's. anything else since the launch of New Coke in 1985.

Actor Doug Jones played Mac Tonight in over 27 commercials for three years in a row. Years later, in 2013, he will declare that that mascot would "mark a turning point in his career that he did not expect". Mac Tonight's voice was Roger Behr's. Director Peter Coutroulis, winner of a Clio Award for a Borax advertising campaign, created several commercials with Mac Tonight, never aired: in one of these, reminiscent of the film ET, the character travels in the sky in a Cadillac while is observed by two astronomers.

Starting in the early 1990s, some McDonald's restaurants were set up with animatronics looking like Mac Tonight playing the piano.

Meanwhile, in 1989, Bobby Darin's son Dodd Mitchell Darin claimed that the song used in the Mac Tonight commercials infringed copyright. In addition, he filed a lawsuit and filed an injunction that the song used in the McDonald's mascot commercials be removed from television and radio advertisements. Almost four years after the launch of Mac Tonight, to avoid further controversy, McDonald's stopped airing those commercials and did not reuse the character for many years.

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