New Taco Bell Ads Support Its Beef

Newest Taco Bell ad features employees defending its beef

A new $3 million ad campaign by Taco Bell has store employees countering a lawsuit and PR campaign against its taco meat. In the ad an employee says, “There’s been a lot of ‘talk’ about our seasoned beef,” as he  gestures quotation marks with his fingers around the word "talk."

Where's the beef? The campaign is an aggressive public response by the taco chain to a January 18 consumer lawsuit claiming that the brand misleads consumers by saying its products contain beef. The lawsuit states that the meat tacos are largely filler, since they do not contain enough meat to qualify as beef under U.S. Department of Agriculture rules.

The chain’s response to the lawsuit was immediate, placing full page ads in the country’s major papers saying, “Thank you for suing us.” It thanked the plaintiffs for giving the brand an opportunity to speak about the quality of its meat products. The company’s brand president Greg Creed followed up through social media by offering a free taco to all of its Facebook fans.

In today’s television commercial, the brand is now offering a $2.39 Crunchwrap Supreme for just 88 cents for the entire week.

What will be the ad's likely impact? Dan Dahlen, industry veteran and managing director of Restaurant Marketing Team, weighs in with Nation’s Restaurant News that the ad will be good for the brand.

Though Taco Bell’s commercials share elements of Domino’s Pizza’s groundbreaking “Pizza Turnaround” ads that drove same-store sales gains for Domino’s for all of 2010 — transparency, real employees and executives on camera — the Mexican brand’s spots are more a reaction than the basis for a whole new campaign, Dahlen said, and probably won’t be seen on the air after this week. “It’s effective in that it’s immediate, head-on and just the facts,” Dahlen said.

But the Colorado Springs Gazette argues that the deep discounting of the Crunchwrap supreme amounts to "food bribery."

The television commercials are combined with a blitz of radio, social media and print advertisements.