The creative idea stemmed from an interesting social listening insight. At one point during the year, Taco Bell was actually bigger than Kanye (based on number of social mentions). Kanye is arguably the biggest thing in culture. But now was our opportunity to transcend QSR and give Quesalupa a place at the cultural throne. Fueled by the #BiggerThan hashtag, we engaged people in a conversation of our “Bigger Than” status and set out to prove that the world agrees — Quesalupa is the biggest thing in culture.

A month before Super Bowl and launch of the Quesalupa, we issued a redacted press release. This first-of-its-kind press release announced that Taco Bell was going to launch a new product during the Super Bowl. But all of the pertinent information about Quesalupa — including the name — was blacked out. People immediately started trying to crack the code of the release. To keep the speculation going, we released teasers a week before the Super Bowl showing that the Quesalupa was a safely guarded secret. That only fuelled more discussion. So we set up a system on our website, Ta.Co, where fans could pre-order the [bleep] online. It was the first pre-order, blind at that, in fast-food history. Personalized gifs let fans brag about their preorder...and let others join the discussion. Yet the item still hadn’t been seen or named — until our launch in the Super Bowl.

*Day 1 sales mix of Quesalupa were twice as high as Quesalupa test market’s day 1 results and 25% higher than Doritos Locos Taco day 1 mix.

*There have been 153,8000 mentions of Quesalupa for 870 million impressions — and counting. For the first 3 days after the Super Bowl, conversation of Quesalupa was dramatically higher than that of Doritos Locos Taco.

*39k+ pre-orders totaling 67k+ Quesalupas — all of them blind pre-ordered

*Tweets about our Snapchat story was the highest for any Taco Bell Snapchat story to date.

*During the Super Bowl, about 40% of total Taco Bell conversation included mentions of the Quesalupa (24.7k Quesalupa mentions, 64.2k brand mentions). Compare this with another product launch during the Super Bowl — Mountain Dew Kickstart — which only received 2k mentions despite higher total brand mentions.

*Passion for the Taco Bell brand overall reached highest levels in 12 months.

(Client data)