Tag: Taco Bell

Taco Bell Rings Wedding Bells For Its Next Live Streaming Event

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
To promote the grand opening of its Las Vegas Strip location, Taco Bell has launched an ambitious social campaign that will culminate with a real wedding in the fast-service restaurant’s new Las Vegas flagship store.

Aiming to stage a spectacle that will drive traffic to the restaurant location, Taco Bells is asking prospective newlyweds to share their love stories on social media with the hashtag #LoveAndTacosContest. The entries will then be able to public votes, and the company will select a winning couple on March 1st for an all-expenses-paid trip to Vegas to get hitched in its restaurant. Taco Bell plans to live stream the ceremony for fans worldwide, and Taco Bell customers who voted in the contest will be invited to attend in person.

What Brands Need To Do
While this is certainly a bit on the side of “out there” as far as branded events go, this campaign is illustrative of brands’ increasing need to come up with bold and creative ways to stage live events so as to grab consumer attention in today’s fragmented media landscape. This campaign cleverly ties the event to a physical store location to drive local traffic while also incorporating live streaming to amplify the reach of the event. As live videos quickly become a crucial component of social media marketing, brand marketers need to think outside the box to come up with share-worthy events that can capture the mobile audience and get them talking.

 

 

Source: GeoMarketing

 

Toyota, Taco Bell & Starbucks Make Play For Branded Content

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
More and more brands are embracing branded and sponsored content in order to reach the increasingly distracted customers. This week alone saw three big brands making a play for content marketing. Toyota is sponsoring an upcoming original YouTube series created by Buzzfeed video creator and star Ashley Perez, aligning its brand message of “helping millennials go places” with the show’s theme of empowerment. Earlier this week, Taco Bell debuted an original weekly video series “Taco Tales” on its YouTube page, aiming to entertain and connect with customers with “stories that could only happen to Taco Bell fans.” Starbucks, on the other hand, is teaming up with three writers from “The Simpsons” for an original video series, which will come in the form of animated shorts that highlight Starbucks’ culture and feature its stores, the baristas, and the customers.

What Brands Should Do
As consumer attention becomes increasingly fragmented and the subpar mobile ad experience drives many users to use ad-blockers {a trend we explained in depth in the Ad Avoidance section of our Outlook 2016), it is becoming more and more difficult for brands to reach their desired audience via traditional media channels. Therefore, brands should take a cue from Mercedes’s influencer efforts and be willing to explore new forms of advertising such as sponsored or branded content, as well as new media formats such as VR and 360-degree video, to circumvent consumers’ growing ad aversion and pique their interest.

 

Sources: As linked in the article

Taco Bell And Sony Set Up NYC Pop-Up To Showcase PlayStation VR Experiences

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Taco Bell is teaming up with Sony to combine the power of tacos and virtual reality in a joint marketing campaign. The two companies set up a pop-up arcade in New York City this week to promote the upcoming PlayStation VR headset along with its own products. Visitors are invited to try out two fun VR experiences, escaping a shark tank or riding on a luge, make custom taco GIFs at a DIY station, and sample various Taco Bell products for free.

There’s also a taco truck outside the pop-up serving visitors cheddar habanero quesaritos, a limited-time product from Taco Bell. Starting Thursday, Taco Bell diners that purchase a $5 Big Box meal will receive a code to enter a sweepstakes for a chance to win one of over 3,300 Sony PlayStation VR headsets, which will go on sale on Oct. 13.

What Brands Need To Do
Taco Bell has a history of partnering with Sony for this type of joint marketing effort. Sony even created a limited-edition gold version of the PS4 that was only available through Taco Bell. This new campaign enlists the immersive power of VR to deliver a fun, engaging experience for consumers while also promoting their products. As VR technology continues to mature, they are becoming a popular choice for experiential marketing. Brands should consider striking mutually beneficial partnerships to create memorable experiences for customers.

The Lab currently has four VR headsets — an Oculus Rift, an HTC Vive, and two Samsung Gear VRs — ready for demos. Virtual reality is something that has to be experienced to be understood, so come by the Lab and ask for a VR demo to get a hands-on experience and figure out how your brand can use it to excite and engage with consumers.

 

Source: AdWeek

Header image courtesy of Taco Bell’s Promotional Video

Taco Bell And Lydia Jump On Slack With Chat Bots

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
More bots are coming to Slack to bring brands closer to the 2.7 million daily users of Slack, a fast-growing, team communication platform. On Wednesday, France-based peer-to-peer payment app Lydia debuted its chat bot on Slack that can understand users’ payment requests in natural language and help facilitate digital transfers between Slack users. Similarly, fast food chain Taco Bell also created a Slack bot to place, customize, and track users’ taco orders in a conversational manner.

What Brands Need To Do
While bots have long lived in the quieter corners of the Internet, the recent surge in messaging app usage and platform development is pushing them into the spotlight. Slack first launched an API for building bots on its chat platform in December 2014, and since then has been populated with bots made by third-party developers. Now, with Microsoft and Facebook both pushing businesses to reach their customers on messaging apps, we expect more brands to experiment with branded bots to connect with consumers.

To learn more about how brands can use chat bots to better serve customers via messaging interfaces, check out our Fast Forward feature on this topic.

 

Source: Wired & TechCrunch

Taco Bell Already Using Snapchat Stories

Posted on by Lab Team

When Snapchat stories launched, nobody was really sure how exactly it would be used by Snapchat users, let alone by brands. But early adopter Taco Bell, who immediately took to Snapchat when it first launched, is already playing with the “newsfeed” of ephemeral images. Essentially, they’re banking on the fact that their consumers love to share experiences of eating Taco Bell – as well as the circumstances of going to the chain – and created a Story that modeled that experience, so as to connect with the followers on a deeper level. As well, Taco Bell is looking to use the medium to give fans a behind-the-scenes look at what goes on at the company and its restaurants. The metrics of this methodology are certainly novel, and are far from defined; nonetheless, the chain is going ahead with the strategy, making them the first of their kind. It’s unclear if there is a direct ROI at this point, but at the very least the brand is doing something different, and making waves in the process. 

Super Bowl Tweets 30% Ads

Posted on by Lab Team

Last night there were precisely 20.9 million Super-Bowl related Tweets, and nearly 30% of those weren’t about the game – they were about the action between the snaps. In total, for every seven tweets about the game there were two about the ads, and the winner for most twitter action of the game was GoDaddy.com, who clocked in at 290,000 tweets – nearly six times as many as Audi, who came in last at about 50,000. However, just because they got more action on the social network doesn’t mean they were necessarily viewed positively: 80% of tweets that mentioned Audi were positive, while just 14% of GoDaddy.com’s mentions were similarly supportive. So although Audi pumped about $150 dollars into every mention on twitter – as compared to GoDaddy.com’s $25, Audi only paid about $1,500 per new follower, as compared to GoDaddy’s $6,500; indeed, Audi netted over 6,500 new followers last night while GoDaddy.com attracted just over 1,000.

So, it doesn’t necessarily pay to be the most mentioned Ad on Twitter. In the end, Taco Bell’s hashtag #livemas was the most mentioned, and they got the highest ROI from a twitter perspective. Success in terms of followers and positive social response ultimately won the night, not controversial advertising.