Situation:

Taco Bell spends millions on innovations, but they haven't gotten the attention they deserve because people don't associate groundbreaking fast food items with innovation. Meanwhile, Taco Bell has the most passionate fans in fast food, rivaling iPhone fanatics. So much so that super fans of the brand on Reddit and other online communities would often scoop and leak new menu items before Taco Bell could announce them.

Brief:

Frame Taco Bell as the most innovative brand in fast food.

Objectives:

Announce all of our product launches before we got scooped by Reddit.

Dominate the social conversation around fast food during Super Bowl weekend.

Claim the title as the most innovative brand in fast food.

Taking a page out of Big Tech's playbook, Taco Bell hosted the first ever tech-style keynote in fast food.

In addition to releasing a year's worth of new menu innovations on stage, the event gave inside access to the Taco Bell test kitchen, featured live performances, and brand ambassador awards, weaving in elements of the Academy Awards into our WWDC-style keynote.

In addition to getting unrestricted access to the top-secret news of 2024's new menu items, Taco Bell fans were invited to attend the live show where they would be the first to taste them. Hundreds of thousands more fans followed along online.

Hosted Super Bowl weekend in Las Vegas, Taco Bell's Live Más LIVE rallied super fans in-venue and online via a livestream. A-list attendees, media access, and social creator seeding were designed to ignite social conversation and send word of mouth rippling across the internet.

Tech companies dominate the social conversation around innovation by announcing their new releases through keynotes. Because Taco Bell shares a similar target audience and wants credit for its history of innovation, we used the same format to release their new menu items.

The respective online communities of talent, VIP guests, and media partners were planned like media channels.

The run of show was designed as a social content cluster bomb, each segment meant to ignite it's own conversations and ripple across distinct social communities and media readerships.

In addition to coverage of the event, media assets were designed and distributed specifically to resonate with the audience of each respective media partner.

Implementation:

We custom-built an event-space on the famous Las Vegas Strip and hosted our keynote during Super Bowl weekend, following all the rules of tech keynotes: huge stage, state-of-the-art live broadcast production, live streaming, celebrity guests, brand ambassadors, and music performances.

Media channels and integration:

A brand new structure on the Vegas Strip, in front of The Wynn, live streamed on YouTube, with social content programming designed to ignite conversation far and wide.

Timeline:

The entire event, including the name, programming, script-writing, and production, was completed in only three months, from the briefing to the day of the event.

Scale:

500 in-person attendees, over 500,000 live-streamers on YouTube, plus millions joining in the social conversation amounting to billions in earned impressions.

7.1 billion earned media impressions.

92.3% positive sentiment.

786 pieces of earned coverage.

Double share of voice in social over benchmarks.

500K+ livestream views.

100K+ concurrent views.

18% lift in online ordering sales during event window.