CREATIVE SHOWCASE

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Client: Taco Bell
Creative Agency: DraftFCB

Calling all late-night munchers! Taco Bell's fourth meal campaign has taken on new form with its latest campaign that hopes to inspire young consumers to make a late-night pit stop for a fourth meal.

Taco Bell's main page has a plethora of interactive elements. You can design sauce packets, animate yourself, watch funny video clips or peruse the many Taco Bell sauce packet-inspired photos.

The bread and butter of this interactive campaign originates in the fourth meal minisite. A taxi driver asks you where you'd like to go, and in true taxi-cab confessions style makes sure to chat up his passengers about the local fourth meal hot spots. You're given a map and some cash. You tell the cabbie where you want to go and he takes you there. The locations include "feed the beat bands," where you can check out bands highlighted by Taco Bell, and then you can hop back in the cab and head toward downtown. When you get there, you can explore what's going down in the big city. You are given a customizable avatar and encouraged to play different kinds of Taco Bell-themed games.

Lastly, you can head over to the "late-night confessions" part of the site, where users are encouraged to watch user-generated videos or upload their own.

There are so many Taco Bell-themed activities on the site, it's hard to keep track, but they all convey the same message: If you're going to be a late-night muncher, Taco Bell is open and ready to satisfy your cravings.
-- Krisserin Canary, associate editor, iMedia Communications

Creative Showcase is meant to be a teaching tool and an inspiration for our readers. We comment only on creative that we really love. Our panelists discuss what makes it great, but if they feel there were missed opportunities that would have made it better, we invite them to mention those. And finally, we seek out a wide range of opinions that reflect the marketplace for the panel, in order to provide constructive, useable feedback for agencies, clients and others involved in these creative pieces.

With its laser-focus on student-age fast food consumers, it's no wonder Taco Bell uses about every digital trick in the book to reach them. This is a site packed full of executions ripped from the marketing feeds. We have the ubiquitous green-screen tour guide. There are avatars for community flavor. Video sharing: check. Mapping integration: check. Casual gaming, peer recommendations and undiscovered bands: they're in there. This site shows that Taco Bell seems to get it and is trying very hard to reach these kids. So the fact that it feels a bit like a ghost town is enough to give us marketers pause.

"Fourth meal" as a concept comes across well on TV. It shows that Taco Bell has a strong point of view. That charming bravado is diminished on the site, which quickly sinks into the "you tell us" softness of user-generated constructs. For the most part, the story neglects to let the users speak. They don't say much. It's embarrassing to see that there is only one video confession posted. Somebody please post another one so that guy is not alone. The mapping utility gets a little more use, but content remains light. Still, there are plenty of amusements. The cab driver can be funny in his trying-too-hard way, and the games are plenty sticky. The tone is consistently playful and it seems reasonable to except some good engagement times here.

Hanging out on this site provokes some Web 2.0 reality checking. If we offer community tools, will we get a community? Talking to this youth market is already hard. Facilitating a true late-night lifestyle destination would be a home run. But this or any other web audience is critical enough to see us coming. Will they invest time and attention to participate in a brand-built community site? Or are brands better off sticking to great storytelling to be heard? I really am asking.
-- Chad Currie, group creative director, T3

Fast food is a pretty ubiquitous part of the contemporary American landscape. So it would seem that an over-the-top, multimedia extravaganza of a website with loads of interactivity would be a little overkill as a marketing tool. TacoBell.com is evidence to the contrary, however. It's incredibly successful both at delivering content and engaging the user.

All of the expected information is available via the top navigation, and easy to find if you want it. Clearly the site's purpose is to get the user to interact with the brand, which is done (quite effectively) through a series of fun and absurd Flash games. The Flash work is fantastic, and the ideas behind the games themselves are generally pretty cool. Some are certainly more elaborate than others, and my favorite was dressing up the sauce packet. I made mine look like Hunter S. Thompson and situated him in Las Vegas. Also, the capability to simple copy and paste your configured sauce packet's information with a simple URL and query string is very nice if you're wary of entering your email address into things. The bull-riding game was also a blast. The ability to modify your avatar and navigate them through the town was fun.

My only criticism would be that all of the giant Flash movies are pretty demanding on your computer's video card. If you happen to be using an older machine (ahem!), some of the animations can be a little choppy. Also, it would be nice if the site kept all of the content in the same browser window. But once you get the hang of all of the daughter windows, it's not a problem.

After playing with the site for while, I can't say that I know anything new about Taco Bell, although I can say that I'd like a Double Decker taco right about now.
-- Jay Del Greco, Interface Programmer/Flash Developer, Ripple Effects Interactive