People love drama. It’s one of the main things that attracts us to movies and TV. We love watching conflict. This Taco Bell advertisement does all this in their latest ad campaign.
When watching the commercial, I’m first thinking how clever Taco Bell was at finding people named Ronald McDonald. Then I wondered if it was even legal to do what they were doing, copyright speaking. Then I wondered if these people’s real names were actually Ronald McDonald. Then I saw McDonald’s response on Twitter and thought, wow, what a lazy response. There is for sure 3 big lessons to be learned here.
First off, what is Taco Bell’s purpose in this ad campaign? It’s to build awareness that they now have a breakfast menu. That’s it. They want people to know. With this ad campaign, they’ve done that. One of the best ways to attract attention is to create controversy and that’s what they’ve done targeting McDonald’s.
Second, McDonald’s had a chance to leach attention off of Taco Bell’s ad dollars. They had a chance to create awareness for something new they were doing. Maybe even to say their breakfast menu was better and that the Egg McMuffin is famous or something. But all McDonald’s could muster was, “Ronald still prefers McDonald’s.” What a wasted opportunity. It’s like they were either lazy or just flat out caught off guard.
But lastly, the big lesson here for small business is that the number one goal of advertising is to create awareness. But a close second, is that you want to leave a positive impression with your targeted audience. My main point is that lots of ad dollars and blanket advertising and big audience reach numbers are nice, but there is definitely a value in ad creative as we’ve seen with Taco Bell.
When creative ad messaging can be advertised in big numbers, there’s a chance to hit a real home run.