April 1, 2009 : Back When Taco Bell Knew Marketing
Personally, I am not a huge fan of April Fools’ Day, but I do like Taco Bell. So while I’m not big into pranks, this one was pretty good.
For those of you that don’t remember, Taco Bell ran an ads in several major newspapers stating they were helping out the economy by purchasing the rights to the Liberty Bell (and decided to rename it to the Liberty Taco Bell). Needless to say, a lot of people complained about this travesty. Eventually Taco Bell came clean, but not before hundreds of media outlets (both print and media) ran the story. The end result, a temporary boost in sales over the next few days.
This was genius – not only was it comical, but financially successful. The sad thing is, the ad wizards went from this idea to their so many horrible tv ads (‘wanna go clubbing?”). Ugh.
posted by Pi Visuals at 11:51 am
Tags: Taco Bell
I hadn’t heard about this before! Funny how Taco Bell claimed to have done it to reduce the country’s debt, and this was in 1996. They could probably pull the same prank again today and fool even more people.