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TACOBELL.COM/GIFTER

the whitespace brief

Every year, on the Taco Bell account, we had what was called The Whitespace Brief.
It was an opportunity for the agency to bring the client any idea that we thought was interesting and radical.
These ideas didn’t have to tie back to a specific product.
When we first worked on it, there were two ideas that rose to the top.

TACO VIEW: An AR-driven experience similar to Pokemon GO, but where you could send your friends tacos and/or discover tacos “in the wild.” (aka near our stores, near competitor stores, during sales dips, holidays, etc)

TACO VENMO: Partnering with Venmo so that people could send each other tacos instead of $$$.

What did these two ideas have in common?
Sending tacos to friends.
Clients liked this idea, and after many rounds, we decided that we needed to create an entirely new platform solely dedicated to sending and receiving tacos.

THE NEW BRIEF

  1. We needed to figure out why we needed this new platform. Is there a reason for it to exist besides the novelty of it?
    2. If created, how could we cause mass adoption of this new behavior (sending tacos)?
    3. Build the actual platform and launch it

THE INSIGHT

In today’s digital world, a lot of previously IRL interactions take place online. There’s a lot of meaningless gestures that we simply do out of habit or autopilot. For examples, wishing someone “HBD” or using LinkedIn’s auto-generated “Congratulations” in response to someone’s promotion. These things feel cold and impersonal.

But on the flip side, doing something IRL now feels too big for many occasions. You don’t just show up to someone’s house and give them a wrapped gift. This led to the thought… there has to be a nice in-between.

We realized that rephrasing it from “sending a taco” to “gifting a taco” suddenly opened a lot of doors.
A taco costs $2. It’s not enough to be a big deal, but it’s just enough to be…. not a thing (an empty gesture).

For example, a congratulations, a thank you, a sorry, these things could all be accompanied by a taco. The taco makes these small moments feel more special. We also recognized the opportunity to invent and create new gifting opportunities.

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TACO GIFTER

Taco Gifter by Taco Bell is a digital gifting e-commerce platform where people can “gift a taco” to anybody for any reason at all. It’s available in the Taco Bell app, mobile browser, and desktop.

HOW IT WORKS

It's super easy—just pick from one of the 300+ GIF cards we made, add a message, pay and send away.
I worked closely with the UX team to carefully craft the flow and language, since it was an entirely new behavior/process.

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THE ANIMATIONS

We worked with animation houses to create a deep catalogue of fun animated GIFs that fans could include with their gift taco. They are as random as the internet is wild.

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THE CARDS

Sometimes people have trouble articulating their feelings, so we created a whole bunch of pre-written lines to help them express their: love, appreciation, happiness, apologies, etc.

REASONS TO GIFT

To expand gifting opportunities beyond traditional gift-giving holidays, we created thousands of reasons for why people could gift a taco. From big, sentimental reasons down to tiny, little everyday reasons. There’s always a reason to gift a taco.

  1. traditional gifting opportunities (holidays, life events)
    2. new, modern gifting opportunities (we invented)
    3. digital platform-based opportunities (native behaviors)

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We took 100 of these unconventional gifting reasons and compiled them into one giant, overwhelming IG story to let the world know just how endless the opportunities are.

THE DESIGN PROCESS

We created a design that captures the playful spirit of giving and receiving an unexpected taco gift.

The most important design was the gift taco itself. It needed to read as the classic Taco Bell taco while also appearing to be a wrapped gift.

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One of the key parts of the gifting experience is finding the perfect wrapper for your gift, so we made it a key part of the Taco Gifter design language. Each reason to gift has its own wrapper, and is fully customizable for future campaigns and new reasons.

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THE LAUNCH

Instead of launching on a traditional gifting holiday like Valentines Day or Christmas, we wanted to convey that this was a totally new thing that was going to reshape how people thought of gifting.

So we launched Taco Gifter on our holiday: National Taco Day.
And to kickstart the momentum, we gave out 10,000 free tacos for folks to gift.

from start to finish

During the LONG lifespan of this stop-and-go project, five different creative directors touched it, and each contributed to it in different ways to help shape and improve it. But since my partner and I were with it from start to finish, we feel a real sense of ownership.

THE RESULTS

  • 10k tacos claimed in just a few hours

  • The highest e-commerce sales day in Taco Bell history.

  • 78% increase in sales across all Taco Bell franchises on that day.

  • Creation of new evergreen e-commerce platform.

  • A few Reddit trolls…(see below)

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